Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008 :
Winning Press Freedom

Additional copies of this book may be obtained by contacting:
World Press Freedom Committee
11690-C Sunrise Valley Drive
Reston, VA 20191 USA
Tel: (703) 715-9811
Fax: (703) 620-6790
E-mail: freepress@wpfc.org
Published by the World Press Freedom Committee
© 2008

Beijing Olympics 2008:
Championing Press Freedom
Paris, Maison de la Chimie
18-19 April 2008
sponsors:
ASIA PRESSE, Paris
COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS, New York
HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA, New York
REPORTERS SANS FRONTIERES, Paris
WORLD ASSOCIATION OF NEWSPAPERS, Paris
WORLD PRESS FREEDOM COMMITTEE, Washington DC
Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
statement of purpose:
The groups sponsoring this conference sought to raise the consciousness of the
journalistic community, especially sports journalists, to press freedom conditions
they would encounter in China. The conference was intended to spotlight the
situation of the press in China - print, broadcast and online media. They also
highlighted the conditions under which foreign journalists may work in China.
program:
Friday 18 April
introductory speech: Merle Goldman Page 5
Prof. Emerita, Boston University; Research Associate, John K. Fairbank
Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University
panels:
1. Press freedom and the Beijing Olympics Page 9
Moderator: Alberto Ibarguen, Pres., John S. & James L. Knight Foundation
Paul Steiger, Chair, Committee to Protect Journalists;
former Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal
Per Toien, Chief of Information, Norwegian Olympic & Para-Olympic
Committee & Sports Confederation (NIF)
Steve Wilson, European Sports Editor, Associated Press;
member, International Olympics Committee Press Commission
Henrikas Yushkiavitshus, Organizer, Moscow Olympics 1980;
former UNESCO Assistant Director General/Communication

2. How are Chinese news media controlled ? Page 20
Moderator: Timothy Balding, CEO, World Association of Newspapers
Bob Dietz, Asia Program Coordinator, Committee to Protect Journalists
Gao Yu, WAN Golden Pen of Freedom winner 1995;
1 st UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize winner 1997
Agnes Gaudu, China Editor, Courrier International Magazine
Guo Guoting, Chinese journalists defense lawyer
3. What reporting conditions should you expect in Beijing ? Page 34
Moderator: Alain Wang, Director, Asia Presse; Editor, Asia Magazine
Vincent Brossel, Head, Asia Desk, Reporters Without Borders
Jocelyn Ford, Chair, Media Freedoms Committee,
Foreign Correspondents Club of China
Huang Xiaolu/Wang Weiluo, Experts on China's environmental issues
Jon Williams, World News Editor, BBC News
4. Trading with China: What risks, responsibilities, opportunities ?
Page 48
Moderator: Sharon Hom, Executive Director, Human Rights in China
Robert O. Boorstin, Director, Corporate & Policy Communications, Google
Kathryn Dovey, Program Manager,
Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights
Peter Scheer, Executive Director, California First Amendment Coalition
Gregory Walton, Asia Editor, Infowar Monitor
Saturday 20 April
5. China's Internet: What freedom/What limits ? Page 63
Moderator: Richard Winfield, Chairman, World Press Freedom Committee
Ronald J. Deibert, Director, The Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for Intl. Studies,
University of Toronto; Co-founder, OpenNet Initiative
Watson Meng, Founding Editor, Boxun News web site
Julien Pain, Director, France 24 TV's "Observers" web site
Yu Zhang, Coordinator, Independent Chinese PEN Center

6. How does China deal with foreign and peripheral news media ?
Page 74
Moderator: Vincent Brossel, Head, Asia Desk, Reporters Without Borders
Oystein Alme, Director, Voice of Tibet radio
Fan Ho-Tsai, Chairperson, Hong Kong Journalists Association
Libby Liu, President, Radio Free Asia
Yuwen Wu, News & Current Affairs Editor, BBC Chinese Service
concluding speech: Jean-Philippe Béja Page 88
Senior Research Fellow, CNRS (French National Center for Scientific
Research)/CERI-Sciences-Po (International Studies Center)
background papers:
1. Beijing’s Legal Obligations as Olympic Host Page 92
Human Rights in China
2. China and the Internet: History, Economy and Human Rights Page 100
Prof. Wolfgang Kleinwaechter,
University of Aarhus, Denmark; former At-Large Member, ICANN Board
biographies of conference speakers and moderators Page 118
links Page 125
Paris Organizing Committee:
Ronald Koven, European Representative, WPFC, Coordinator
Vincent Brossel, Head of Asia Desk, RSF
Virginie Jouan, Co-Director, Press Freedom & Development, WAN
Kajsa Tornroth, Co-Director, Press Freedom & Development, WAN
Alain Wang, Director, Asia Presse
Juliette Oehy, Conference manager
Barry James, Conference publication editor
Simultaneous translation was provided in English, French and Chinese

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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Introductory remark:
Mark Bench
Executive Director, World Press Freedom Committee
You may wonder why certain organizations are not represented here.
The Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG), the International
Olympic Committee, the Internet Society of China, the Chinese Delegation to the UN
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization here in Paris, and various Chinese official
or semi-official media all declined to come or ignored our repeated invitations.
NBC, the Olympic television rights-holder, and the sports manufacturers and Olympic
sponsors Nike and Adidas also declined.
I should also inform you that the conference has been subjected to a hacker attack from a
source that our computer experts have traced to Hong Kong. Messages have come in over
the past couple of weeks with return addresses mimicking that of the conference site.
If you download them, they will deliver a Trojan onto your computer - that is to say, they
will make your programs vulnerable to future attacks. The hacker uses the conference site
address, but, unlike ours, his address ends with the postscript “Yahoo.” So don't open
anything looking as though it comes from us, but ending in “Yahoo.”

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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Introductory speech
Reporting the good and the bad:
a help to China’s development
Merle Goldman
Professor Emerita of History, Boston University; Research Associate,
John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University
China's leaders had hoped that holding the August 2008 Olympics in Beijing would draw
attention to the great achievements that have taken place since the death of Mao Zedong
in 1976. The occasion would mark China's arrival as a world power and show off its
physical modernization and dynamic economy.
But in the lead-up to the Olympics, China's actions have produced just the opposite effect.
They have focused attention on its repressive policies in Tibet and the Tibetan areas in
China's provinces as well as in the Moslem areas in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.
In the past few weeks, Beijing's policies in these areas have sparked protests and violent
repression. The protests of Buddhist monks in Burma a few months earlier focused
attention on China's support of the repressive and militarist regime in Burma.
Steven Spielberg's resignation as the director of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing
Olympics drew world attention to China's activities in the Sudan. Here, in addition to
developing energy supplies and infrastructure, China has been supplying Sudanese agents,
the Janjaweed militias, with arms with which they attack the Darfur region, leading to the
killing of more than 200,000 people.
Moreover, in the process of building the facilities for the Olympics in Beijing, it is estimated
that more than a million people have been evicted from their homes with little
compensation to make way for stadiums, sports facilities and new roads. These events
have diverted attention from the image China's leaders seek to project to the outside
world of its economic achievements and a society living in “harmony.”
While those events have received the most attention, there are other important events
going on in China on the issue of human rights that have not received much attention and
that even more contradict the image China seeks to portray.
In the negotiations for the Olympics, Foreign Minister Liu Jianchao promised to improve
China's human rights record. Yet, in the runup to the Games, China has cracked down on
a number of critics of the Communist Party. This internal crackdown has received much
less attention in the media than the events in Sudan and Tibet and the interrupted journey
of the Olympic torch. But this phenomenon of internal dissent in the long run may be
more important in determining what happens in Tibet and the Sudan than the anti-
Chinese demonstrations that went on all over the world.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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In the past year, China cracked down on journalists. In fact, while foreign journalists may
have gained more freedom to report, just the opposite is happening to Chinese journalists
in their own country. There has been a tightening of media controls and increasing
harassment of journalists, political activists and human rights advocates. As one of your
sponsor organizations, Reporters Without Borders, has pointed out, 29 Chinese journalists
- others say 50 - were arrested in 2007, more than anywhere else in the world.
Nevertheless, China today is not that of Mao Zedong, where people were persecuted for
who they were, not just for what they said and did. Thus, Mao purged writers in 1955,
intellectuals in 1957 and members of his own Communist Party whom he believed were
conspiring against him in the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. In the post-Mao
period, there is more personal, economic, artistic and intellectual freedom, but there is no
political freedom. Anyone who publicly criticizes the party's political policies or tries to
organize with others to make a political statement or take a political action is persecuted
and jailed.
A new phenomenon, however, has developed in the post-Mao era that may have
increasing influence on political events, including events in Tibet and Xinjiang. It is the
emergence of a middle class. Most members of China's rising middle class are not a
bourgeoisie, a class that first appeared in Paris. They are not independent actors. Most of
China's middle class are rising entrepreneurs, who are quickly inducted into the party. This
partnership works well for both the party and the entrepreneurs. Membership gets the
entrepreneurs' compliance with party dictates, while providing the entrepreneurs with
access to land, resources and markets. The entrepreneurs are unable to conduct their
business without connections to the party. Nevertheless, this rising middle class made
possible by China's move to a market economy in the post-Mao period has spawned on its
fringes a number of public intellectuals, journalists and defense lawyers who act more
independently.
Despite the fact that, unlike the rising entrepreneurs, they do not have the protection of
the party, a small number of them have spoken out on sensitive political issues, have
helped defend those who are accused of “political” crimes and have joined with ordinary
people in their protests against the party's corruption and confiscation of their land for
modernization projects. For the first time in the People's Republic, intellectuals are joining
with ordinary people in protests against injustice, which I describe in my last book “From
Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China.”
Because China's move to the market has made it possible for journalists, lawyers and
public intellectuals to earn incomes independent of party control, it allows these groups
more freedom to speak out and to act publicly on political issues than during the Mao era.
For example, in the post-Mao era, most newspapers are no longer totally supported
economically by the state. They have to find their own commercial support and to do that,
their editors and journalists have made great efforts to enliven their newspapers to gain
readership. One of the most successful in these efforts has been the Southern Weekend
(Nanfang Zhoumo) in Guangdong. Its investigative and daring articles have upset the
party and several of its editors and journalists have been purged and some imprisoned,
but the paper continues its independent stance and maintains its popularity.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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The appearance of defense lawyers is a new phenomenon in the People's Republic. Before
the post-Mao era, those accused of political crimes had no one to represent them and
usually were forced to defend themselves. Since lawyers in the post-Mao era were able to
make money in commercial transactions, they could afford to take on political cases. But
they are still at great risk because they, too, are detained and sometimes arrested. Yet,
there is now a score of famous lawyers who will take on sensitive political cases.
Public intellectuals are another new phenomenon in the post-Mao era. Because they can
now earn money as freelance writers and by publishing in Hong Kong and elsewhere, they
speak out publicly on political issues without losing their means of livelihood, which would
have happened under Mao. Among the 29 intellectuals who signed the petition protesting
China's crackdown in Tibet were a few academics, but most of the signatories were public
intellectuals.
A number of human rights activists have been recently arrested. Among them is Hu Jia, a
computer specialist, who was sentenced to three and a half years, supposedly for
“subverting the state.” He has been a major figure in the effort to make the nation aware
of the spread of HIV/Aids and called attention to its spread through the use of unsanitary
needles while drawing blood. He also publicized China's civil rights abuses and had written
an open letter in September 2007 pointing out that China had failed to live up to it
Olympic promise to improve human rights.
Instead of improving its human rights situation as promised, the party in anticipation of
the Games has carried out a harsh and growing crackdown on domestic human rights
defenders, who have been detained, intimidated, punished and jailed in the party's effort
to ensure that their actions will not tarnish the China's image in the outside world. It is
unlikely that the volatile situation in Tibet and Xinjiang can be resolved until China's own
human rights defenders are able to achieve their rights and continue their work. There
needs to be a change in the political system before these areas can gain autonomy.
Foreign journalists can play a major role in helping to bring about political changes in
China. China's leaders desire a positive international assessment of their country,
especially during this moment of unprecedented scrutiny. Mao did not care what the rest
of the world thought of him or of China; he was totally fixated on transforming China into
a Communist state based on his own ideology.
But China's present leaders do care about their image in the outside world. They want to
be active participants in the world community and desire international respect. They are
embarrassed by worldwide criticism; they are very much aware of foreign journalists'
writings about happenings in China and do not want it depicted as a pariah nation.
China acceded to international pressure in 1997 and signed the UN Covenant on Economic
and Social Rights, which the National People's Congress ratified a year later. In 1998,
China also signed the UN Covenant on Political Rights, but that has not yet been ratified
by the congress.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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I advise journalists to continue to do what they have been doing, but even more so. They
should focus not just on China's repressive policies toward the Tibetans or the Uighurs,
but toward its own people. They should call on China's leaders to live up not only to their
international commitments, but also to the stipulations in China's own constitution, whose
Article 43 calls for freedom of speech and press. And they should continue to question
Chinese officials about journalist colleagues in prison.
Journalists, who are read by millions, can have a great impact on what happens in China
and be a powerful force in the struggle for human rights - much more so than professors,
whose books are read by a few other professors and, maybe, their students.
At the same time as they report on China's growing economic, military and international
stature, journalists should also describe the discontent, repression and environmental
degradation that have accompanied the country's economic development and that have
worsened in recent years.
Reporters at the Olympics in Beijing should not only point out China's rise as a modern
great power, should not only describe the athletic achievements, and not only report on
China's denial of freedom to the Tibetans and Uighurs, they should write about the denial
of freedom to its own citizens. In this age of globalization, the international media have a
major role to play in showing that no matter how powerful the country may become, its
human rights violations against minorities and especially its own people cannot be hidden.
The media's exposure of China's human rights violations can help exert international
pressure on China to live up to its own international commitments.
China does respond to outside pressure as seen with its signing of the two UN covenants.
We should continue to engage with China, participate in the Olympics, and speak in a
moderate voice, but we should also continue to criticize China's human rights abuses. We
should emphatically point out the failure of China's government to fulfil its own voluntarily
made promises to improve rights in order to win its bid to host the Olympics.
There is a danger that China's tight controls and suppression of human rights advocates,
imposed to ensure stability and peace for the Olympics may once the Games are over
become the new norm. Even more worrisome is that the worldwide protests against
China's policies in Tibet and Xinjiang have sparked a virile form of nationalism among
China's youth, who have vociferously expressed public antagonism toward foreign critics
and efforts to boycott the Olympics. Of the public intellectuals who signed the petition
against China's policy in Tibet, not one was below the age of 30.
Despite the explosion of antagonism expressed by the youth against Western critics, we
have to accept the fact that China has once again become a major power and we should
do all we can to incorporate it into the world community, not only economically, but
politically and culturally. The West must stay engaged in dialogue with Chinese leaders, no
matter how tense the relationship may become. Otherwise, instead of the 2008 Olympics
marking China's recognition as a modern power, it may come to enshrine hostility to the
modern world it so wants to join.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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Panel 1
Press freedom and the Beijing Olympics
moderator: Alberto Ibarguen
President, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
China and IOC: Falling short on their pledges
Paul Steiger
Chair, Committee to Protect Journalists
Our concern with the media situation in the runup to the Beijing Olympic Games is simple:
Neither China nor the International Olympic Committee have fulfilled the pledges they
made in 2001 that China’s media would be free and open in time for the Games.
On the day before the Olympics were awarded in July 2001, the Beijing Organizing
Committee promised the media “complete freedom” before and during the Games.
Specifically, China said in making its official bid, “There will be no restrictions on
journalists in reporting on the Olympic Games.”
Not only have China and the IOC failed to live up to that promise, China has actually
moved away from fulfilling it. Although some rules have been lifted for foreign journalists,
their Chinese colleagues face tighter than usual restrictions on their reporting. We have
seen the restrictions slapped on foreign journalists trying to report on the demonstrations
and ensuing ethnic violence in Tibet and surrounding provinces and regions in March. The
Foreign Correspondents Club of China says it has been informed of more than 180
incidents of harassment of colleagues since it started keeping a tally last year.
For Chinese journalists, the Central Propaganda Department’s censorship machine is
running at the higher level it uses to control news flow during critical party congresses and
national legislative assemblies, when the government wants to stifle all criticism and put
on a display of national unity. And even though there has been a flurry of releases earlier
this year, China continues to hold 24 journalists behind bars, the largest number of any
country in the world.
These restrictions persist despite the growth of commercialized Chinese media which
regularly press the limits of government restrictions, while their readers increasingly
demand accurate, timely information.
The press freedom situation is aggravated by the apparent reluctance of the International
Olympic Committee to press China to meet its pledges. When it does discuss the media
issue, the committee makes tone-deaf statements like: “It is not within our mandate to act
as an agent for concerned groups. Journalists are imprisoned all over the world,
sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons.” That was an answer the IOC

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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Olympic Games Executive Director, Gilbert Felli, gave the Committee to Protect Journalists
in Lausanne in November 2006, and the line has barely changed since.
Nor is this a situation in which China can claim that it is being forced to accept Western
standards of governance through some sort of unwarranted interference in its internal
affairs. After competing with four other cities in 2001, it entered into a contractual
agreement with the International Olympic Committee to host the Games. One of the
promises it made was that it would fix its media problem. When skepticism arose back
then, both sides assured the world that by 2008, China would have moved on from its
increasingly archaic censorship policies.
Unfortunately, after seven years of avoidance and delay, we now must hope that things
will get better in the short period before the start of the Games. Otherwise, the 25,000 to
30,000 visiting journalists can expect some challenges when they cover the Games and
particularly when they cover the China that lies beyond the Games’ venues.
Resident foreign correspondents already assume their phones are tapped and their e-mail
scanned, particularly if they are the sort of reporter who digs deeper into controversial
issues. They also know they are running the risk of a confrontation if they look too closely
at issues like the military or Taiwanese independence, pro-democracy activists, HIV/AIDS
villages, the Falun Gong, or underground churches that meet without the government’s
permission. The pressure has already started and will increase on groups that might try to
pull off a demonstration to catch the attention of foreign cameras in Beijing.
But, more importantly, newcomers to reporting in China should realize that their Chinese
counterparts are not allowed to play by the same rules. And that particularly applies to the
thousands of young production assistants, translators, gofers and fixers they will be hiring
to help them once they start to spread out across the country.
Experienced Chinese journalists know the limits of their freedom. The Committee to
Protect Journalists has not spoken to any of them who say they plan on breaking new
reporting ground while the Games are on - though some have wistfully said they wished
the sort of relaxation of rules for foreigners would be extended to them.
It is the younger college students and recent graduates, with the language skills and
enthusiasm to catch the eye of a foreign correspondent, who will be more at risk. We are
concerned that when foreign news teams arriving in Beijing hire local Chinese assistants,
they will place demands on them that might put them in jeopardy.
Reporters who ask their Chinese hires to arrange potentially dangerous meetings, say with
activists, or to visit an HIV/AIDS village, or get advance information on potential
demonstrations that the government will want to quash, might be putting their Chinese
colleagues at risk. It is not inconceivable that they will be made to pay a price, if not
during the Games, then afterwards, when the world’s attention has moved on.
Clearly, these are not the open Games the world has become accustomed to, or the
Games we were promised in 2001. After the revelations of corruption involved in Salt Lake

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, host cities since then have made their
agreements public in the name of transparency. The only city not to do that is Beijing.
Recognizing that the Games presented us with an opportunity to exert greater than usual
influence around China’s media policy, last year the Committee to Protect Journalists
produced a report, Falling Short: As the 2008 Olympics Approach, China Falters on Press
Freedom, which we are in the process of revising. Our intention is to speak to the
journalists covering the Olympics. We want to give them practical advice on how to work
as a journalist in China, as well as tell them of the conditions under which their Chinese
colleagues are working.
As an organization working on behalf of journalists and press freedom, the committee has
refrained from calling for a boycott of the Beijing Games. We are as convinced as anyone
else in this room that China will not reverse its media policies by August, nor any time
soon after that. China’s media polices are an integral part of its authoritarian political
system, and will only change when the government is prepared to cede more political
freedom to the Chinese people.
The Games still present an opportunity for journalists to influence not only China’s media
policies but its overall authoritarian approach. That is the power of the press, which can
still make an impact, even if China and the IOC do not meet the pledges they made in
2001.
Norway’s Olympic athletes:
trained for human rights
Per Toien
Chief of Information, Norwegian Olympic and Para-Olympic Committee
& Sports Confederation
The Norwegian Olympic Committee and Confederation of Sports embraces every aspect of
sport in Norway. From a child's first encounter with organized sport to preparation for the
Olympic podium, all athletes are part of our organization, known for short as the NIF. Out
of 4,5 million Norwegians, NIF has 2,1 million members.
Sport and therefore NIF are integral parts of Norwegian society. We cannot distance
ourselves nor our athletes from the issues concerning our society, sports is politics and
always has been.
The NIF is not a political organization. Yet, we voted to take part in the Olympics in
Beijing. We thought dialogue is better than boycotts. Like everyone else, we hope that the
Games, as an important part of a long-term process, will lead to positive developments for
human rights.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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The Games mean that 25 000 accredited journalists will be in Beijing. They would not be
there and would not be able to report the same way, were it not for the Olympics. In
addition, there will be 10,000 athletes and support staff, in mutual and hopefully open
dialogue, in addition to spectators and tourists who will be able to report and document
the situations they experience.
Even the disputed torch relay has represented a tremendous world wide exposure. In no
way would the Tibet situation receive such attention without the Olympics in Beijing.
The Olympic Games can - and should - become an outstanding opportunity to focus
attention on the challenges of China. The fact that China so very much wants to arrange
the “perfect games” is an advantage for human rights. It enhances the possibilities of
change, or at least of influence over the process of change. The possibility of sanctions, in
our opinion, is in all probability more important than an actual boycott.
The IOC shares the ambition of making sure the Games leave a legacy, since otherwise its
very brand would be at stake. But it may also be wise to consider a word of warning from
China. Kristoffer Renneberq, a longtime correspondent in China for one of our major
newspapers, Aftenposten, has reported, “The pressure from Western countries toward
China last month [during the Tibet crisis] has brought fuel to the fire for Chinese
nationalism. To a large extent, this nationalism is built from below. It is ordinary Chinese,
not the authorities in Beijing, who now are gathering their wrath and directing it toward
the West.”
If the Chinese feel that the West again is stomping on their pride, their Games - a feeling
underscored by the skewed reporting in China - what long-term effect will that have on
the action of the Government and the development of human rights in the country?
Very early, NIF saw the challenges of participating in the Olympic Games and started an
internal exhaustive process on how to approach the matter. Our president, Tove Paule, is
no chicken. She is succinct, clear and outspoken. She utilizes her possibilities and does
speak out. We have met everyone that wants to speak with us - or to us. We have had,
in our opinion, an extensive cooperation with Amnesty International with the aim of
educating us, novices in the field of human rights. We have sought knowledge and
expertise from institutions of higher learning and research institutions.
We have joined the Ethical Trading Initiative and have adopted ethical guidelines that are
clearly communicated to our partners and suppliers. With major labor organizations in
Norway, we have facilitated a meeting with the IOC regarding the production of Olympic
promotional goods.
Norwegian athletes have been schooled and continuously updated on the situation in
China. For more than two years, the squad coaches, officials and probable athletes, have
been given written material, and have attended our own seminars with researchers,
journalists and other experts on China, offering knowledge, advice and media training.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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All the officials of the Norwegian delegation have been run through a scenario work shop
run by the security branch of our police, and just last week, a report by the Norwegian
Institute of Foreign Policy was sent to all the athletes along with a legal evaluation of
possible consequences of various forms of expression. We have also sought and will follow
the advice of the Foreign Ministry regarding international situations that may occur.
Norwegian Olympic athletes have a right - a human right - of freedom of speech. They
may speak out on human right questions in China, before and during the Games.
Naturally, they decide on their own participation, and may decide not to take part in the
opening and closing ceremonies if they so choose.
But the main focus of these athletes, after years and years of intense training, is on
performing to their utmost during the Olympics. On that account, we must also respect
the athletes that do not want to become engaged or to speak out. For example, we know
that our handball team will not participate in the opening ceremony, but this is because of
athletic, performance-related reasons. A very limited number of athletes chose, for
performance-related reasons, not to participate in the opening ceremony in Athens in
2004. Hours of waiting, standing around in the heat and so on, were reasons enough not
to take part. No one questioned their decision. Will anyone accept the same argument this
time, or will non-participation in the ceremonies be linked to the boycott issue?
Athletes may not use the Olympic arenas for demonstrations, however, and in choosing to
participate, we have accepted the Olympic charter and will play by the rules.
Some of our best athletes have chosen to speak out on human rights in partnership with
Amnesty International and have been encouraged to do so if they, as individuals, felt it
was important. Our President, Ms Paule, has told me that she is proud of these athletes –
and, of course, she should be.
We also hope that the organizations utilizing this opportunity to highlight human rights
issues or the Tibet situation will seek and find other venues and arenas in addition to the
arena of sport to influence the government of China. Because there are, of course, other
possibilities, including trade. For example, all the clothes, all the shoes and all the
equipment worn and used by all the athletes, are probably made in China.
The Norwegian sports organizations have sought information about the situation in China,
often with the help of Amnesty International. We have shown, through our actions and
speech, that we do care about human rights. We have not tried to excuse atrocities and
we have challenged our politicians and the International Olympic Committee to raise
human rights issues with the relevant authorities in China.
Just last week in Beijing, [the International Olympic Committee's President, Jacques]
Rogge raised the possibility of the athletes, even in the mixed zone after their events,
being allowed to clearly express their views on any matter. Influencing the human rights
situation in China is a long-term task in which the Olympics are just a milestone, although
an important one, where I believe that NIF can be proud of its position and its actions.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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A backlash to coverage
Steve Wilson
European Sports Editor, Associated Press;
member, International Olympics Committee Press Commission
I cannot think of any other Games that have attracted so much interest in terms of press
coverage, scrutiny and controversy as the past few weeks have shown in China. Ever since
Beijing got the Games seven years ago, one key issue was going to be how China was
going to deal with the influx of tends of thousands of media on its doorstep. That is
something that has never happened before.
I was in Beijing during the well-publicized protests along the Olympic torch relay in
London in Paris, San Francisco and in Buenos Aires. So the atmosphere was quite lively.
Most striking of all, though, was that throughout the entire week of press conferences,
media briefings and interviews, not one question was ever raised about the sports events,
about the venues or about the preparation and readiness for the Games themselves. Not a
single one. And not even a single question about the air pollution in Beijing, which a few
months ago was probably the headline issue of these Games.
It was all about the politics, the torch relay. It really underlined how unrealistic it is to
consider the Olympic Games as just a sporting event. It involves so much more. The
International Olympic Committee was repeatedly asked about some of the hot issues, but
the President, Jacques Rogge, would not be drawn into dealing with the human rights
debate. Their position is that they should try not to cross the lines into politics.
However, the one issue where he did speak quite directly and openly was on press
freedom, referring particularly to the law that was enacted on January 1, 2007 in China,
which lifted many of the restrictions on the foreign press working in China. The law allows
foreign media more freedom to travel and to do interviews. My colleagues in China tell me
that this law has definitely improved conditions for them. The problem is that the
regulations can be undermined on the ground at the local level where interview subjects
may be under pressure or intimidated not to cooperate with the media.
There has been an ugly backlash against the Western media over the coverage of Tibet.
Many Chinese feel that the coverage has been distorted or biased. There has been a spate
of e-mails and telephoned threats, and quite serious menaces against journalists in
Beijing, including some from our own bureau.
The current situation has fed this nationalism and hostility toward the West and the media
in particular. If the situation persists, or gets worse in the next few weeks or months, the
media could find things difficult, in that the people they want to talk to are going to feel
more nervous and reluctant to cooperate.
For journalists who have not been to China before, there are a few simple realities that
anyone who lives in China knows well. For example, CNN, BBC World or other foreign

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
15
satellite channels are available only in hotels, offices or compounds where foreigners live.
The Chinese do not have access to them. Newscasts are regularly blacked out.
Access to foreign news sites on the Internet is also regularly blocked. The International
Olympic Committee has stressed that the Internet must be open during the Olympics, that
there should be unfettered access by the press to web sites. That is something that the
committee can deal with directly, since it is part of the host city contract with the Beijing
organizers. It is not theoretical. It is a contractual point that the committee can push.
TV broadcasters have also had concerns. There was some suggestion that broadcasting
live from Tiananmen Square might not be allowed. Some TV stations would like to use
that venue as the perfect backdrop for their reports during the Olympics. There were even
questions in Beijing while I was there whether the TV feed would be live. Will all
broadcasters have access to live footage from all venues, or would censors opt to delay
coverage in case of any incident or protest? We were assured that the feed will be live.
30,000 journalists are expected to be there – that's three journalists for every athlete. Of
that number approximately 20,000 will be accredited. That leaves 10,000 unaccredited,
and that is another issue. The Beijing International Media Center will be for unaccredited
journalists and who will therefore not have access to the Games venues. They will be in
Beijing hoping to report on what is going on during the Olympics, and they will have some
press conferences at the center as well as access to information from the Olympics.
The main interest of a lot of these journalists is not going to be who won the beach
volleyball medal, or even the 100-meter dash. They will be as interested in things outside
the field of play as inside of it. How China copes with that will be interesting.
Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former President of the International Olympic Committee,
used to say the success of an Olympics is determined by the press. My company will have
up to 300 people there. It is one of the biggest events we have ever covered. I am not
passing judgment on political issues, but we as a company are counting on the same
working conditions that we had at previous Olympics. We have been promised by the
organizers that that's what we will have.
Apart from some of the bigger issues we have touched on here I think what journalists
really want at the Olympic Games is smooth logistics and working conditions - to be able
to get to the venues on time, to connect their computers and get them to work, to be able
to file and get their information via the communications system.
People ask me where we have had the most difficulty obtaining those conditions. Well, I
have covered 10 Olympics, and I can think of one in particular where the press had a lot
of trouble. Information and technology, and the results system barely worked, creating
chaos for many of us. The buses got lost, and we got to venues late or not at all. Even the
athletes faced the same challenges. There was an us-against-them mentality between the
press and organizers. That was in 1996 and that host city was Atlanta.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
16
What the Games taught me about press freedom
Henrikas Yushkiavitshus
Former UNESCO Assistant Director General for Communication;
organizer, Moscow Olympics, 1980
Even though the International Olympic Committee claims that the Olympic Games are not
political events, they do usually have political connotations. My first Olympics were Mexico
in 1968. Already, during the year leading up to them, I discovered that some broadcasters
were more welcome to the Olympic venue than others.
I was then the director of the Technical Center of the International Radio and Television
Organization in Prague and needed to go to Mexico to sign an agreement with the
Mexican organizing committee for Intervision, the international TV organization of the
Warsaw Pact, on broadcasting the Games to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
I was told at the Mexican Embassy in Prague that with a Soviet diplomatic passport, it
would take six month to get a visa, and then only after giving my fingerprints.
The signing ceremony together with Eurovision was scheduled for a week later, so I called
Henry Haar, the Secretary General of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva,
asking him to sign the agreement on our behalf.
To my astonishment, the next day, an employee of the Mexican embassy turned up at my
office with my visa and no further reference to fingerprints.
That was the result of a most impressive lesson in professional solidarity. I found out later
that the president of the EBU, Sir Hugh Green, who was also Director General of the BBC,
had telegrammed the Mexican organizing committee informing them that if within 24
hours Mr. Yushkiavitshus did not get his visa, the Eurovision delegation would not go to
Mexico either, meaning that nobody in Europe would see the Games. Good cooperation
between Eurovision and Intervision lasted for many years, despite the Cold War.
In Mexico, things did not go so smoothly. A week before the Games, more than 200
demonstrators were killed by the police. Two American sportsmen were punished for
giving the Black Power salute at an award ceremony. And the Czech gymnast Vera
Caslavska, who won four gold and two silver medals, turned her back on the Soviet flag
during the award ceremony in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
August 1968. She was given a very difficult time after her return home.
The tragedy of the Munich Olympic Games is well known. There were also political
overtones before the Olympics. I was negotiating the license fee and technical facilities for
Intervision. We had only $300,000 to pay for everything. Even though the dollar was then
much stronger than today, it was still very little money, compared, for example to the $10
million that Eurovision was paying.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
17
West German Chancellor Willy Brandt was promoting his policy of “Opening to the East,”
and I told my German colleagues that if they wanted to change the image of Munich in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from that of Hitler in beer halls to that of an Olympic
city, it was they who should be paying us to promote the change, not we who should be
paying them. My German colleagues were convinced by the argument, and we settled on
a price of $300,000. And the cooperation we got from the German side was excellent.
26 nations boycotted the Montreal Olympic Games after New Zealand, whose national
rugby team had recently played in South Africa, was allowed to compete even though the
apartheid regime of South Africa had been banned from the Olympics since 1964. Another
small incident: a Soviet diver fell in love with an American girl and did not return to the
Olympic village. Excited Soviet officials came to me and asked that I get the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation to air an appeal from the diver's mother. We had very good
cooperation with CBC and the appeal was broadcast, but the love-stricken diver returned
to Russia only much later.
I got my white hair from the Moscow Olympic Games of 1980. I was then Vice Chairman
of the Soviet State Television and Radio Committee, and was given responsibility for the
media coverage of the Games. I was made responsible for everything - the construction of
a new Olympic television center, the development and production of color television and
radio equipment (we could not buy it because of the embargo over Afghanistan), and
reaching agreements with foreign companies on the world coverage of the Games.
We could not use foreign producers and cameramen, but we tried to train our people and,
to that end, we organized many meetings and seminars for our staff, inviting foreign
television journalists and producers. It was not easy to persuade the Soviet authorities to
issue the necessary visas without delays.
Once I was told that an Israeli journalist, Alex Gilady was categorically denied a visa. I
called the foreign office and they told me that it was not them but the KGB that was
responsible. I called the KGB General Ivan Pavlovich Abramov, who was responsible for
journalist visas. He told me that there was no question of giving a visa to Gilady because
he was from Mossad, the Israeli secret service. I replied that if Gilady was indeed from
Mossad, he should be their target and they, the KGB, should invite him to dinner and pour
vodka into him. But if he was not, then it was our business. If Gilady was denied a visa, I
said I would have to resign, and I told the KGB general my Mexican visa story. Gilady got
his visa. Today, he is a member of the International Olympic Committee.
The biggest headache was the boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. It was a disaster both for the sportsmen and for world television.
We had prepared, for example, excellent technical facilities for the National Broadcasting
Company. It had paid us $87 million but never got to use them.
60 teams boycotted the Moscow Games. Of the Western countries, only Britain, France,
Italy and Sweden participated. When some American athletes challenged their president's
decision, Jimmy Carter threatened to cancel the passports of any who went to the Games.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
18
The National Broadcasting Company did have some regular news staff in Moscow but the
US rules meant they could only broadcast general news, not sports events.
During the Games, there were problems with the security people. In the television center,
they set the metal detectors to such a high degree of sensitivity that an alarm would go
off even if somebody had a single metal tooth. The first three days, this resulted in
endless queues trying to enter the center.
Just an hour before the opening ceremony, the head of the Eurovision team called me
saying that security would admit only one person per media outlet, even if the plans called
for three. Things improved only after I told the Minister of the Interior that Eurovision
would not cover the opening ceremony and that he would have to explain why to the
world audience.
There was no censorship. It was technically impossible anyway because foreign
broadcasters could produce programs themselves and go directly on the air from their
studios in Moscow, and also from Estonia, where the sailing events took place.
The boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow had a negative impact on the Olympic
Games in Los Angeles, which the Soviets decided to boycott. I participated in the meeting
of the Soviet Olympic Committee when this was decided. Vitaly Smirnov, a member of the
International Olympic Committee, and I voted against the boycott, but the Soviet press
reported that the decision was unanimous.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party explained that this was not revenge for
the boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games but because emigrant groups in Los Angeles
threatened terrorist attacks against Soviet sportsmen. There were indeed letters with such
threats, but I'm not sure that they were not “arranged” for by Moscow. As a member of
the International Olympic Committee television committee, I had visited LA and had met
with the local security services. They were well prepared to protect the Soviet team.
Of course, there were fools on both sides. One Los Angeles newspaper published an
article saying that most Soviet sportsmen were KGB agents. Some real KGB officers used
that assertion as an added argument to justify the boycott of the Olympics.
I suggested that it would be very easy to solve the problem: The young gymnasts upon
landing at Los Angeles airport could leave the aircraft with the slogan on their Olympic
uniforms - “I am a KGB agent.” My humor was not appreciated.
Since the protests have erupted in Tibet on 10 March, Chinese authorities have attempted
to prevent information about the development from reaching both domestic and
international audiences. Journalists have either been expelled from or denied access to
regions where protests happened. As a result, there have been statements by some public
figures calling for a boycott of the Beijing Games.

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19
But if you really want human rights and press freedom in a given country where you think
there are problems, don't start calling for rights and freedoms just before Olympics, but
fight for them daily, as many journalists in China and elsewhere have done for years.
Some of them, like Burmese journalist U Win Tin, have been in jail for many years, losing
their health in the process, while politicians in the outside world have remained silent.
Very often today, human rights and press freedom is much less important to politicians
than selling Boeings, Airbuses or MIGs.
In my opinion every Olympics is a chance to reinforce press freedom and human rights in
the country where the Games take place. Calls for boycotts of the Olympic Games are
cheap ways to seek publicity at the cost of the sportsmen.
Media professionals of the host country are caught in a bind - under pressure from their
own government and politicians on one side, and from the world press, their colleagues,
on the other. Clever cooperation between host media and visiting media seems to me to
be the most productive way around the issue.
The host country media must have enough courage to explain to their politicians that the
only way to counteract any negative publicity resulting from press freedom is to give
media more freedom. An atmosphere of real freedom is of itself good publicity.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
20
Panel 2
How are Chinese news media controlled?
moderator: Timothy Balding,
CEO, World Association of Newspapers
The moderator’s introduction:
I believe that most of us here who work for organizations that endeavour to further
human rights have more than once been treated to one or other epithet which
characterize us as at worst simple-minded and culturally and politically ignorant, at best,
naïve idealists with no sense of political realities and nuance -- adepts of what the French
call 'angélisme,' or do-gooders, or innocents abroad. In short, we complicate the lives of
the diplomats and politicians who really grasp what's going on and understand the levers
of change and how they operate.
Today, with China, the shoe has never been so firmly and clearly on the other foot, as
politicians and their appointees, though increasingly wriggling in discomfort, continue to
maintain their cosy conversations behind closed doors
The experience of China and the Olympics is, in fact, yet one more example of the terrible
naivety and short-sightedness of those in leadership of our governments, our sports
organizations and our businesses as they deal with repressive regimes like the one in
place in Beijing. History, if nothing else, amply demonstrates that dictators do not
voluntarily and spontaneously give up power, do not loosen the chains, do not remove the
gags, after sudden illumination and conversion to belief in freedom and other human
rights. They do so when they are forced to, generally through a combination of intense
internal and external opposition and dissent.
The idea that awarding the Games to China would, alone and in itself, change the
repressive politics of that regime and usher in a new era of respect for human rights was
thus condemned, in my view, from the outset, particularly in the absence of forceful,
aggressive, binding, monitored demands on human rights by the international community.
There was nothing much more, in fact, than a pious and rather innocent hope.
In this session, we shall look at how the media continue to be controlled in China. I would
particularly like to welcome and salute the courage of Gao Yu, who has flown here from
China to share her experience and views. It is precisely people like her, prepared to stand
up for their opinions, who, if sufficiently numerous, will one day change China.
Such change simply will not, cannot, happen without such extraordinary, brave individuals,
who make the momentous choice to go into resistance against lies, injustices and
repression of human rights. It is our duty, and should be that of our governments, our
businesses and our organizations, to support people like her in every possible way. It is
not only a duty, but a necessity, if we really do want to contribute to a better future for
the great Chinese people

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21
Tensions in China's media universe:
between independence and censorship
Robert Dietz
Asia Program Coordinator, Committee to Protect Journalists
It is clear the Chinese government wants the Olympics to come off without a flaw. That
preoccupation has led to overly aggressive attempts to control the media. While those
attempts will most likely be futile, experience shows that China tends to err on the side of
heavy-handedness when it comes to dealing with anything that challenges the image of
China as a unified nation with little internal dissent.
Despite all the negative factors I will be listing in the next few minutes, China’s media
universe has continued to expand for more than a decade, driven by commercialization
and the demands of an increasingly sophisticated readership. Many Chinese reporters
pursue stories in a competitive atmosphere that is similar to that faced by reporters
outside of China. They and their editors regularly push the limits of censorship, and many
Chinese journalists tell us they feel freer than they have ever been to report.
That may be true, but in the period leading to the Olympic Games, the Central
Propaganda Department’s censorship machine is running at the higher level it uses to
control news flow during critical party congresses and national legislative assemblies,
when the government wants to stifle all criticism. And, even though there has been a
flurry of releases earlier this year, China continues to hold 24 journalists behind bars, the
largest number of any country in the world. Since China was awarded the Olympics on
July 13 2001, at least 37 journalists have been imprisoned for their work, and 16 of those
37 remain there. But the jailing of journalists in China does not tell the entire story. The
vast majority are not in jail, and operate within a system of well-defined limits, set by the
party's propaganda department - which was renamed in 1998, in English only, the Central
Publicity Department.
Though the Chinese constitution protects freedom of the press, speech, and expression,
there are institutional barriers to the free distribution of news in China. All news outlets
must be authorized by the State Council and must comply with specific regulations
guarding almost every aspect of operations: hiring and training practices, the amount of
their registered capital, where they are located, ties to any sponsoring state agency, and
the number of their news bureaus.
The propaganda department's regulations for broadcast, print, and Internet news outlets
list broad categories of unacceptable content, including anything that “disrupts the social
order or undermines social stability” or is “detrimental to social morality or to the finer
cultural traditions of the nation.” Organizations that violate these regulations may be
punished with fines or closure. By law, all news outlets must be affiliated with a state
entity, but the degree of direct party oversight, the level of financial pressure, and the
influence of reporters and editors vary across regions and types of media. Print and
Internet media tend to have more leeway than broadcasters. Authorities in Shanghai have

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
22
a reputation for tolerating little political criticism from the city’s media, while media in
Guangzhou are aggressively commercial.
The propaganda department operates under the control of the Politburo Standing
Committee, which gives it a great deal of authority. The department and its local branch
offices monitor appointments of media managers and tell managers via telephone and
e-mail which issues to stress in reports and which topics to avoid. Groups of senior cadres
working in “monthly evaluation small groups” critique news coverage seen as inaccurate
or politically undesirable. News content is also monitored by a newspaper’s own
employees. Their job is to keep their organizations from making political “mistakes.” The
propaganda department's hold on the media is further facilitated by collaboration with the
General Administration of Press and Publications and the State Administration of Radio,
Film and Television. Both of them regularly issue regulations, reminders, and reprimands.
It is interesting to note that the daily and sometimes hourly directives handed down by
the propaganda department are no longer always delivered by e-mail. Increasingly,
directives are given by telephone, so that there is no electronic trail of the department’s
messages. We have been told that the method changed after some of those messages
appeared in the publication Falling Short, the Committee to Protect Journalists' report on
the Olympics.
Penalties for editors and reporters crossing the censors’ line are mostly administrative.
Serious infractions are noted in their employment record. If a publication steps too far out
of line, it may be shut down or see its staff “reorganized.” These are not uncommon
practices. Each year, several high-profile publications disappear, or offending staff are
demoted and shuttled off to publications where they can have less impact.
Within China’s commercial press, the payment system for journalists is another method of
content control. At most papers, reporters receive bonuses when their articles are
published, and those bonuses make up the bulk of their income. The end result is that
staff reporters are more likely to go after stories that will make it into print, or at least
cover them in a way that will not offend the censors. Although there is tremendous
competitive pressure to pursue stories that will grab readers, editors know that they
cannot push the boundaries too often before they and their papers come under scrutiny.
Journalists who do go too far and are taken to trial are generally charged under the 1988
laws intended to guard state secrets. These provide a catch-all basis for punishing any
citizen for disseminating information deemed sensitive. Among the general categories it
lists as secret are major policy decisions on state affairs, national defense and military
issues, diplomatic activities, national economic and social development, science and
technology, investigation into criminal offenses, and “other matters that are classified as
state secrets by the state secret-guarding department.” The State Secrecy Bureau can
simply decree that given information is secret, even after it has entered the public domain.
The vague outlines of this law are the greatest stumbling block in efforts to build true
watchdog journalism in China. As we have seen, for journalists the law is almost
superfluous; there are enough social and administrative controls in online, broadcast, and

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
23
print media to insure that nothing very sensitive is leaked. Authorities use state secrets
and security laws as a last resort for the criminal prosecution of journalists. The law
carries its own particular barbs. It allows suspects to be held for months, even years,
without access to a lawyer. It allows extension after extension of pretrial detention. And it
often brings steep jail terms.
Mo Shaoping, a veteran Beijing lawyer who has represented many jailed journalists, told
the Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this month that “there has been no reduction
in cases where subversion charges are brought against people for articles they have
written. If anything,” Mo said, “these cases have increased in the past one or two years.”
It is clear that China’s promises for a freer media in time for the Games in August will not
be fulfilled. Beijing and the International Olympic Committee have failed to follow through
on the pledges they made to the world in 2001. Even though Chinese journalists have
been abandoned by the International Olympic Committee, we should make it clear to
them that they still have the support of their colleagues as they attempt to expand the
media universe in which they live and work. We should use the internationalist spirit of the
Games to deliver that message to them in the coming months.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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China’s editors as watchdogs
-- biting for the Communist Party
Gao Yu
WAN Golden Pen of Freedom winner 1995,
1st UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize winner 1997
The new rules governing the work of foreign journalists during the preparation and
running of the Beijing Olympic Games, approved by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao entered
into force on Jan. 1, 2000. These rules did not cover Tibet, where foreign journalists must
still demand special permission to operate.
On that day, the Reuters news agency interviewed China's best-known political prisoner,
Bao Tong. Shortly afterwards, Reporters Without Borders sent a delegation to China to
meet with government authorities. Everyone then thought that the Chinese government
had decided to keep the promise it made in 2001 as part of its Olympics bid, and that this
was the start of an improvement of the rights of man and freedom of the press in China.
Nevertheless, foreign journalists were ceaselessly harassed in their work throughout 2007;
they were arrested or beaten more than 80 times, while the number of Chinese journalists
and media professionals condemned for their opinions has not stopped growing.
During the demonstrations in Lhasa on March 10, foreign journalists and even those from
Hong Kong with permission to work in Tibet, were expelled.
On April 3, 2008, the human rights campaigner Hu Jia, who is equally well-known as a
“citizen journalist,” was condemned by the Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing to three
and a half years in prison and loss of his civic rights for a year. As the Olympic Games
approach, this cases demonstrates in a terribly symbolic way the position of the
Communist Party toward freedom of expression. It also shows the reply of the Chinese
authorities to the demands of the international community.
The detention of Chinese journalists because of the Olympic Games did not begin in 2008.
I think it is necessary to consider my own case. On Sept. 23, 1993, Beijing failed to obtain
the organization of the 2000 Olympic Games. I was arrested on Oct. 2; on Nov. 10 the
following year, the Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing condemned me to six years in
prison and a year’s loss of my civic rights for “divulging state secrets.”
During an interrogation I stated that at the start of 1993, I had sent two articles on
current affairs to the Mirror, a left-wing review in Hong Kong. That was the only proof
authorities were able to use against me. They used me as a “symbol” before the
international community, but also as a pawn in the negotiations during the visit of
President Jiang Zemin to the United States in 1997 and that of President Clinton to China
in 1998.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
25
During these two years, my prison frequently received orders to arrange my release as
part of a “political exchange.”
But it was not until 1999, during the Chinese New Year, just before the visit of Prime
Minister Zhu Rongji to the United States, that I was freed “for medical reasons.”
Throughout my imprisonment, several of the international organizations participating in
this conference as well as Hong Kong journalists and the Hong Kong Journalists
Association supported and helped me. It is only now, 15 years later, that I have the
possibility of thanking you personally.
Sadly, the situation of the press in China has still not evolved. If you compare my case to
that of Hu Jia, my punishment was heavier and the legal proceedings were even more
unjust. Not only was my family not allowed to attend my trial, but my defense lawyers
were also prevented from doing so. Nevertheless, in comparison between the situation of
the press in China in 1993 and in 2008, I think that, in this Olympic year, it is much more
catastrophic.
The position of human rights and press freedom in China has slowly worsened over the
years, and this tendency has intensified since the Tiananmen Square massacre. Deng
Xiaoping did nothing more than carry out economic reforms without advancing political
reforms by a single step. Violence and repression have been used to assure the stability of
society, while the gap between rich and poor has been widening in an alarming way.
Many problems have come to light as a result of the dramatic question of human rights,
the fracturing of society, the degradation of the environment, the corruption of officials
and difficulties weighing on the poorest sectors of society (such as education, health,
housing, land use, financial risks and inflation), and the sharp contradictions at the heart
of society.
As for the current project of creating a “harmonious society,” it consists in reality of
preventing the population from understanding or even of interesting itself in the somber
history of our country and its present circumstances. Neither the Communist Party nor the
various authorities have accepted this responsibility. On the contrary, they continue to use
the traditional method of controlling the press to prevent the population from
understanding reality.
For 60 years, there has been no law to protect Chinese journalists and media
professionals. In the 1980s, the National People’s Congress began preparing a draft of a
law on the press, but it was then impossible to defend the rights of journalists openly.
There were violent discussions between the draft’s defenders, such as Hu Jiwei, a member
of the Congress, who supported a text guaranteeing respect for the law by the Communist
Party, and the government. But a representative of the Leftist forces, Hu Qiaomu, in
charge of ideology, argued that the law should apply only to journalists and information
professionals. Hu Jiwei refuted this: “It is necessary also to control those who control the
press, those who control the officials as well as the organs in charge of the press.”
Following three amendments to the text, the Leftist current succeeded in stifling

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
26
the voices of the reformers. After the Tiananmen massacres, the draft was completely
abandoned. That is why today, the various levels of power can exert pressure on
journalists with total impunity.
Freedom of the press and human rights constitute the most serious problem now facing
China. At the approach of the Olympic Games, all Chinese who have suffered oppression
hope to be able to use this occasion to seek justice; the international community hopes
that the Chinese government will improve the situation of the press and human rights in
line with the pledge made in 2001. But the Chinese authorities see these internal and
external pressures as “politicization of the Olympic Games.” Unhappily, counterattacking
these criticisms by repressing freedom of the press only underlines this contradiction.
Today, the Chinese press industry is increasing at the same pace as the economy as a
whole. In 2005, it represented one seventh of the world’s press industry. Otherwise, the
industry has unhappily not changed since the epoch of Mao Zedong.
The director of the Central Publicity Department (formerly the Central Propaganda
Department) was promoted to the Politburo at the Communist Party’s 14h Congress.
It is no longer possible today to control the press by increasing the number of posts in the
propaganda bureaus. Instead, the Publicity Department and the General Administration of
Press and Publications (GAPP) have recruited a large number of press review officials, and
the provincial and local bureaus have done the same. The press review officials are
generally retired senior officials who are paid for their work and required above all to be
politically “reliable.”
In general, they write one report a month, or more if the situation demands. These
reports are used by the Publicity Department and the GAPP as sources for articles in
Xinwen Yueping (Review of the News), a publication of whose tone and language recall
those of the Cultural Revolution. The affair of Bing Dian (Freezing Point), which caught the
attention of the international community, began in fact with an article that appeared in
Xinwen Yueping.
China is the only country in the world that practices such censorship of the press and of all
publishing outlets, as shown by the surprising number of such press review officials.
During times of crisis, the media have no right of initiative and are obliged to carry only
information from the official agency Xinhua. That is how the Publicity Department has
managed to extend its control over the press and publications aacross the country.
This system is a hundred times more perverse than the one in Prussia that even Marx
criticized in his time. Let us give some other examples: in March 2007, the economic
magazine Caijing appeared with a cover-page interview with the jurist Jiang Ping, which
stated that “the General Affairs Office of the Central Committee had decreed that the law
on property should be adopted by the National People’s Congress.” The Publicity
Department, in a fit of fury, ordered all copies of the magazine to be withdrawn from sale,
and that a new cover be substituted at the magazine's expense.

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On Jan. 19 2008, the weekly Nanfang Zhoumo organized a prize ceremony for the year
2007. A special prize in the magazines category was given to the review Yanhuang
Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn of Yanhuang). As the name of the magazine appeared on
the screen, Du Daozheng and Wu Si, respectively the editor and assistant editor, went to
collect the prize. At that very moment, a mysterious but clearly influential caller demanded
that the prize be withdrawn. This incident became the “scoop” of the ceremony. Du
Daozheng, having been director of the GAPP, dared to denounce this situation to the
Central Publicity Department, which denied having issued the order. Du Daozheng then
referred to “the mystery call.”
From this, once can see the extent to which the operations of the organs to control the
press are secretive and obscure. No written document is accessible by the public, be it at
the national, provincial or local level.
Not only the Central Publicity Department interferes with the press. On July 30 and 31,
2007 the daily Xiaoxiang Chenbao (the Hunan Daily) and the Economic News of Hunan TV
channel issued information about an increase in the price of tofu and losses suffered by
producers of food based on soya beans. The National Development and Reform
Commission alleged that this information was false, and on Aug. 5, it got the Xinhua
agency to publish an article denouncing the information. But by then the price of tofu had
in fact increased.
Journalists who tell the truth are punished, and the rewriting of articles by the official
media has become a Chinese specialty. For example, the journalist Xiao Shifeng of
Xiaoxiang Chenbao was fired and, in another case, the reporter Zi Beijia of Beijing TV was
condemned to a year in prison for an allegedy false report about adulterated dumplings.
The journalist Pang Jiaoming of the China Economic Times (known for its articles about
attacks on “false journalists”) received death threats after publishing an article denouncing
the poor quality of materials used in the manufacture of rails for the nation's first highspeed
rail line between Wuhan and Canton. The government denied the information and
obliged the China Economic Times to fire the reporter.
Zhu Wenna, a journalist on the magazine Faren - which belongs to the official newspaper
Fazhi Ribao (Judicial Daily) - published an article on Jan. 1, 2008 accusing Zhang Zhiguo,
a party official in Xifeng (Liaoning province) of failing to follow correct judicial procedures
in a case against a businessman who had sent a satirical text message about him. The
management of Fazhi Ribao ordered the journalist not to return to work, provoking such
an outcry that the party official was dismissed.
Since the Tiananmen events of 1989, a new method of controlling the press, by exerting
economic pressure, has seen the light of day. Of the media belonging to the party, only
the People’s Daily, the Guangming Ribao, the Jingji Ribao, the China Daily and the Qiushi
review are supported entirely by public finances. The other publications have been pushed
onto the market and mustcompete with each other for advertising revenues. Advertising
agencies and enterprises have thus become the party’s “soft power.”

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28
No company wants to advertise in a publication that is not in the good graces of the
authorities or which is liable to be criticized. This soft power combined with the iron
methods of the Central Publicity Department does nothing but increase censorship and
self-censorship. Not a single journalist dares write an article criticizing the Olympic Games.
To do so would reduce the advertising in his publication, and he would then risk being
fired or having his pay cut. Copy editors need an even more critical spirit to control the
articles written by the journalists. The editors are in effect the guardians of the Central
Publicity Department since their task consists of supervising the journalists and copy
editors to avoid attracting official wrath. There is a saying that Chinese journalists
attribute to their editors: “I am the watchdog of the party. I stand in front of its door. If it
asks me to bite someone, I obey.”
The financial liberalization of the media has not been followed by any progress in press
freedom, and this combination of soft power and tough regulation has been responsible
for serious problems of corruption in the media. Investigations by reporters are not
necessarily meant to be published or used to increase the value and authority of their
publications, but to obtain advertising and financing from companies operating illegally.
How does this work? The reporters carry out their investigations in secret, and once they
have gathered information concerning illegal acts, they write a report that is used to extort
large sums for “publicity” from the company concerned. Press outlets are very generous
with such reporters, and give them up to 40 per cent of the sums obtained. The national
journals are in contact with the big companies, including those quoted on the stock
exchange, while the small journals content themselves with striking up deals with mines or
illegal brickmaking works.
The death of Lan Chengzhang of Zhonggguo Maoyi Bao (Journal of Commerce of China)
at the hands of men from an illegal coal mine in Shanxi occurred under such
circumstances. The weekly China Economic Times carried out an investigation and
published articles affirming that Lan Chengzhang was a “false reporter” - not because he
did not have a press card but because, in the three years he had worked in a local news
bureau, he had not published a single article. Apparently, in this province, it is not rare to
see dozens of journalists turning up at a mine where an accident has happened to receive
a handful of yuan as “expenses for keeping their mouths shut.” Sometimes, the same
newspaper can send six or seven of its staffers.
Before coming to France, I interviewed Hu Jiwei, former editor and director of the People’s
Daily and president of the National Association of Journalists in China, today aged 92. He
said, “One cannot hope that the Communist Party and the government of Beijing resolve
all the problems of human rights and press freedom before the Olympic Games. But the
Chinese government ought to free all those imprisoned for their opinions, including all
journalists and cyber-dissidents.”
I think that if the authorities do not listen to our appeal to free Hu Jia, the Olympic Games
will only worsen the situation of freedom of the press in China.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
29
Reading between the lines
Agnes Gaudu
China Editor, Courrier International magazine
I have been working for the weekly Courrier International since 1997, where I read the
Chinese press in search of significant news. So it is from this vantage point, as a journalist
and as a reader, that I'll try to make a few observations on how the control of the press
makes itself felt.
The Chinese press acts as a barometer of the political situation. This is particularly true in
times of political crisis. In the past few weeks, Chinese newspapers have provided their
readers with hardly anything but the official viewpoint. This can be interpreted as the
result either of self-censorship by journalists, or a toughening of the political guidelines
issued to them. In any case, the press stops carrying anything new or investigative
whenever the leadership is faced with any kind of challenge, such as the Tibetan crisis.
Some issues are totally and permanently excluded. Even if we weren't aware of the details
of the strict guidelines for journalists issued by the authorities, the restrictions imposed
are easily observed. In general, the following topics are not raised in the Chinese press:
opposition, dissidence, contemporary events directly linked to dissidence, and any
information about politically motivated arrests. For instance, in recent months, nothing has
been revealed to Chinese readers of the arrest and sentencing of Hu Jia, a prominent acti
human rights and environmental activist who was given 3 1/2 years in jail earlier this
month. The activists best known in the outside world are totally unknown to Chinese
readers.
The press does not cover any historical events that are highly sensitive politically, such as
the Cultural Revolution and the anti-rightist campaign of 1957.
Other topics can be covered, but only from the official viewpoint, including Taiwan,
relations with the Kuomintang and the development of relations across the Taiwan Strait;
anything relating to the Falun Gong and religion in general; questions about the quality of
the administration, unless a solution has already been found by the authorities; trials or
police inquiries; and strikes, or petitions. Of course, the situation in Tibet and Xinjiang
under Chinese rule are also on this list.
Access to international news is limited. International coverage consists mainly of news
agency dispatches giving factual information. Occasionally, authorized analyses by Chinese
experts and reflecting the state of thinking at the helm of the country do get published.
Diplomatic issues are often treated with delays of a few days, if not a few weeks.
International news with major implications for China is severely restricted. The most
striking example of this was in September 2007, when the Chinese media did not cover
demonstrations led by the Burmese monks. Chinese readers had access several days later

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
30
to a delayed and short series of Xinhua dispatches, the only version allowed to be carried
by all newspapers.
Political restrictions have an impact on journalistic genres and styles. Some types of
articles are totally absent from the Chinese press. A portrait of a Chinese political leader is
something totally unheard of. Official are generally not quoted on controversial topics. A
newspaper will almost never publish interviews, and if it does, it will be almost exclusively
by scholars or artists.
Despite all this, Chinese journalists are not shy of using the whole range of journalistic
techniques, and say things without being targeted. In the case of the Burmese
demonstrations, some newspapers dutifully reproduced nothing but Xinhua dispatches,
but gave as much information as possible in their headlines.
In the past decade, a very ambivalent situation has prevailed in the Chinese press. On the
one hand, journalists have been watched, sanctioned and imprisoned. Information has
been censored, newspapers and web sites closed down. On the other hand, the Chinese
press has exerted a big push for reform. Many reports appeared on issues long deemed to
be sensitive. Nothing directly political ever gets published. But many articles about issues
regarding people's livelihood which have far-reaching political implications do get
published, especially when the authorities are willing to address those issues.
A whole range of financial and economic newspapers now exist, and their coverage has
regularly expanded to the social aspects of a growing economy. Articles on education, the
health system, employment policies, transport, the environment, etc., can indeed be found
in the most serious newspapers. I'll give a few examples
• In 2004, the Canton weekly Nanfang Zhoumo revealed the emergence of a labor
shortage in Guangdong province. By examining that issue, this leading magazine
was able to underline the need for better salaries and working conditions for
migrant workers.
• In 2006, the news weekly Zhongguo Xinwen Zhoukan revealed that in the name of
economic interest, some polluting industries were being moved from rich coastal
provinces to poorer inland provinces willing to accept nuisances.
• In 2007, the financial magazine Caijing raised the issue of the aging of the
population and the fact that some experts were questioning the one-child policy
Coverage of these issues may be incomplete or debateable, but its very existence
indicates the scale of social issues, which would not have been covered at all not long ago.
It may seem paradoxical today, but in recent years, the Chinese press has actually given
some space to scholarly opinions on a few crucial issues, including human rights.
In 2004, in the Xinhua magazine Huanqiu, a few judicial officials and legal scholars started
voicing criticisms about the scale of the application of the death penalty, and called for its
drastic reduction. The press revealed a few stories about executed convicts who were
later proven innocent. Shortly afterwards, the government decided to refer all death

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31
penalty appeals to the Supreme Court. Although the number of executions is a state
secret, there are reasons to believe that the number did drop slightly in 2007.
In late 2007, in the weekly Nanfang Zhoumo, a number of legal experts and intellectuals
jointly released an appeal to eliminate laojiao, the system of reeducation through labor.
This system of administrative detention has been denounced for decades by international
human rights organizations. It remains to be seen whether the government is willing to
move towards its elimination.
In both cases, the press has given space to debates taking place in the upper levels of
power and ran stories about them in real time. The coverage of general news, scandals
and tragedies has greatly developed. In the last decade, the Chinese press seems to have
taken on the role of orchestrating public outcries against bad practices at various levels of
the government. Scandals of all sorts have been denounced, such as corruption cases,
modern slavery and ecological disasters. Journalists have clearly expressed the view that
excessive control of the press is detrimental to good governance.
In February 2008, the bad weather in the south during the spring festival holiday season
provided the occasion to run editorials raising the issue of the State's responsibility for the
lack of disaster relief response. The time is not so far distant when no disaster ever
appeared in a Chinese newspaper.
In the past few years, two key events in China have been extensively covered by the
press, making it apparent even to the Chinese government that its control of the press
could actually be detrimental to the smooth handling of crises.
The first event was the SARS health crisis. In early 2003, newspapers in the south of
China reported a mysterious illness, that had been creating a panic since the previous
November. Health authorities then resorted to an old habit and orchestrated a news
blackout. But in March, the illness spread to Hong Kong, and questions arose about SARS
from the rest of the world. A military doctor, Jiang Yanyong, revealed the scale of the
epidemic to a German magazine Der Spiegel. The government then stopped denying the
crisis and started tackling the problem with a little more openness and efficiency.
Those events were turning points for the press. The words “transparency,” “responsibility”
and “public opinion” began appearing in Chinese editorials. When Chinese authorities
seek to cover up information, editorials now often recall the SARS crisis to warn of the
consequences of news blackouts.
In May 2003, Sun Zhigang, a young designer with no residence permit in Canton, was
arrested by the police for being an illegal migrant. He was taken to a repatriation center
for migrants, where he was beaten to death. The story was revealed by the local
newspaper Nanfang Dushi Bao, and was then quickly taken up by the entire Chinese
press. A public outcry followed, and legal scholars stepped in to demand the abolition of
the repatriation centers for migrants. They were abolished in the following months.

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32
This outcome could be construed as the sign of the emergence of a Fourth Estate in
China. On the other hand, the media outcry actually coincided with a pre-existing political
concern about the status of migrants as second-class citizens. The disappearance of the
repatriation centers was most probably already in the pipeline. The Sun Zhigang affair was
used as a showcase of the government's rare responsiveness to a hot issue. It is still
widely cited as a model of scandal exposure with a political effect in China.
In January 2008, a passerby was beaten to death by so-called urban management officials
(chengguan) in Wuhan as he was taking pictures of a scene of violence. The press
exposed the disproportionate use of force by the city guards. Many columnists recalled the
Sun Zhigang affair, formulating the hope that the unlawful death would limit the excessive
use of force against simple citizens.
In conclusion, the Chinese press, with its extraordinary commercial expansion in the past
decade, is very diverse in terms of editorial angles as well. Whether the enormous efforts
of some journalists to play a greater role in the public life will lead to more transparency
and less control remains to be seen.
So far, this does not appear to be the case. In the past few weeks, China's press has sunk
back into ideology. It is obsessed with so-called Tibetan “splittists.” Nevertheless, some
Chinese intellectuals signed a petition for negotiations with the Dalai Lama, and had it
published on the Internet. And in the Chinese press itself, a couple of courageous
editorialists have written about Tibet with opinions differing from the official viewpoint,
also in favor of opening talks with the Dalai Lama. This means that some journalists
believe it is safe to express such an opinion, or that it is worth taking the risk.
Human rights lawyers: 15 out of 150,000
Guo Guoting
Chinese Journalists' defense lawyer
Guo Guoting practiced law in China for 21 years, handling more than 1,000 shipping and
trade cases before become involved in human rights when he took on the defense of a
colleague who had been jailed for opposing Shanghai authorities over the eviction of
neighborhoods marked for real estate development.
Now living in Canada, Guo defended practitioners of the Falung Gong spiritual movement,
evicted home owners and jailed journalists, including Shi Tao, a reporter for the daily
Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News), who was arrested after the Yahoo
Internet portal identified him as the author of a message to the Democracy Forum web
site in the United States. Consequently, police raided Guo's law offices, seized his files and
placed him under house arrest. Extracts of his presentation follow:
No journalist wants to get involved in such cases because the Chinese government uses its
whole weight to control the media.

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33
Often the control measures lack any kind of legitimacy. Instead, the Communist Party's
Publicity [propaganda] Department tells newspapers, television stations and magazines,
“you should not cover this, you should not cover that.” If anyone does not obey, they will
face a lot of trouble. They risk jail and could be sentenced to 10 or 12 years in prison.
Of course, it is better now than in Mao Zedong’s times, because then anyone who
disobeyed the authorities would lose his life.
So many journalists and writers nowadays lose their jobs and even their freedom, simply
because they post their political opinions on the Internet.
Shi Tao, an award-winning journalist, was arrested for “illegally providing state secrets to
foreign entities” after he used his Yahoo account to e-mail notes about government
directives on media coverage of the 2004 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The police already had Shi under observation and identified him within 24 hours of the
message being sent. But it was not until six months later that he was arrested. He was
sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2005. Court records indicated that Shi’s arrest and
conviction was based in part on information provided to Chinese authorities by Yahoo.
Chinese lawyers are reluctant to get involved in media and civil rights cases because of
the threats to their own livelihoods.
In China, there are about 150,000 lawyers, but only maybe 15 human rights lawyers. Of
these 15 lawyers, 90 per cent have lost their jobs and some of them have been sentenced
to jail. Two of them have been sent to labor camp. Three of them were fired by their law
firms. I mention this because human rights lawyers are experts in law, but they
themselves have no human rights. So ordinary people in China, how can they have human
rights? Of course, they have none.
I did research to try to find out why media control in China is so serious. The main reason,
I think, is that Chinese government is losing confidence in itself.
The authorities know that if they relax control over the media, their authoritarian regime
would be faced with collapse. But now they are being increasingly challenged online,
which is why the propaganda department has introduced 55 regulations just to control the
Internet.

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34
Panel 3
What reporting conditions
should you expect in Beijing ?
moderator: Alain Wang
Director, Asia Presse; Editor, Asia Magazine
Press freedom: an unkept promise
Vincent Brossel
Head, Asia Desk, Reporters Without Borders
The crisis in Tibet and the international protest demonstrations that accompanied the
running of the Olympic torch have awakened the old demons of Chinese nationalism. With
the complicity of the authorities, Chinese Internet users, journalists and ordinary citizens
have gone to war against “Tibetan separatists” and their supporters, notably the
international media. Some journalists working for liberal Chinese publications, especially
the Nanfang Dushi Bao, have also been harassed.
Since March 10, there have been more or less spontaneous demonstrations against
foreign media accused of being anti-Chinese, which has extended to a commercial boycott
that no doubt seeks to put pressure on countries hesitant about the posture to adopt in
the runup to the Olympic Games.
At the very time when Beijing was expelling the last foreign journalists from Tibet, Chinese
bloggers and the official press launched a violent attack against the “Dalai Lama clique”
and Western media that devoted much space to covering the events in Lhasa.
Usually on the Chinese Internet, it is impossible to publish a message about Tibet unless it
is first filtered and controlled by the cyber-censors. Yet all of a sudden, we have seen
e-mail messages calling for death for “Tibetan separatists.” These threats were turned
against foreign media after the fiasco of the visit to Lhasa arranged for a score of foreign
correspondents. Alerted to what was going on by a group of Tibetan monks, the reporters
wrote about repression and a climate of fear rather than, as the Chinese authorities had
hoped, about the return to order and the sense of responsibility of the Tibetans.
The virulent campaign against foreign journalists has been directed particularly against the
CNN television news channel, whose journalists are accused of being “leaders of the liars”
and racists. The web site anti-cnn.com, which claims to “expose the lies and distortions in
the Western media” and to be maintained by volunteers not connected with the
government, asks young Chinese to send faxes and e-mails to CNN demanding apologies.
Messages with formula insults: “You running dogs are not welcome in China,” “You are
going to suffer as a result of your biased reporting,” “Sooner or later I am going to kill

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
35
you,” are sent by the dozens to journalists. Chinese web sites post the personal contact
details of journalists, particularly those working for the Associated Press, The Wall Street
Journal and USA Today, making them easy targets for the nationalists who have been so
strangely authorized to protest.
In the face of this crisis, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China sent security advice to
all its members on April 7, advising them to get in touch with their embassies, to conceal
personal details, to leave notice of their whereabouts when traveling and to report the
most flagrant threats. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was not in a position to control
the threats.
So it is in a tense and hostile climate that tens of thousands of journalists are about to
arrive in Beijing to cover the Olympic Games. Nothing suggests that this nationalist wave
is going to calm down. Indeed, the repression in Tibet and the refusal of the authorities to
concede improvements in human rights threaten to radicalize the two camps.
Foreign journalists are going to be faced with many other problems. First, will be that of
finding Chinese interlocutors who can talk to them about the human rights situation. Even
if tongues have loosened in recent years in China, and particularly in Beijing, it is still very
risky to speak about the lack of freedoms on camera in front of a foreign journalist.
Those dissidents who have sought to draw attention to lack of liberty in the period leading
up to the Olympic Games have been the targets of a merciless repression. The bestknown
example is that of the dissident Hu Jia, whose imprisonment is clearly linked to his
pivotal role in denouncing human rights violations to foreign journalists and diplomats.
In arresting and punishing Hu Jia, the government is addressing a clear message to
Chinese dissidents: “Watch out. If you talk to foreigners about the Olympic Games, you
will suffer the same fate.” The authorities are also sending a warning to the foreign press:
“You see, we can arrest and condemn those you interview, and there is nothing anyone
can do to stop us.”
Lastly, the Chinese authorities are cocking a snoot at Western diplomats, particularly
Europeans, who had found Hu Jia to be both moderate and charismatic.
To rub in the message cynically, the police and the prosecutor cited two interviews that
Hu Jia had given to the foreign press - just to be sure the message was well understood.
Other embarrassing witnesses have also been imprisoned. One of the founders of the
Chinese Democratic Party, Zhu Yufu, was condemned in the eastern province of
Hangzhou. The human rights activist Zheng Mingfang was sent to a labor camp for two
years because of an open letter he had written about the Olympic Games.
In March, Yang Chunlin, initiator of the campaign “We want human rights, not the Olympic
Games” was sentenced to five years in prison by the intermediate court in Jiamusi, while
two other participants in the campaign have also been detained.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
36
Wang Lianmin, a resident of a neighborhood condemned to be demolished to make way
for Olympic installations was arrested this month because he objected to the destruction
of his house.
Police have been ordered to turn back foreign journalists who attempt to enter villages
that have been the scene of disturbances. In 2007, no less than seven journalists were
stopped for questioning or attacked when they attempted to enter the village of
Shengyou, south of Beijing, the scene of fighting in 2005 in which at least six persons
were killed when thugs sought to take land away from farmers. The journalists attacked
included Barbara Luthi of Swiss TV, who was beaten up by police.
German journalists were stoned by thugs, apparently employed by the police to dissuade
them from visiting the house of the wife of the jailed blind lawyer Cheng Guangcheng.
To do reporting other than of a sporting nature, the thousands of foreign journalists, of
whom only a tiny minority will be able to speak Chinese, are going to have to find Chinese
journalists or translators willing to take risks.
There is a shortage in Beijing of good “fixers” capable of helping a foreign reporter in a
sensitive investigation. Resident correspondents in Beijing work with researchers or
translators because it is still impossible to hire a Chinese as a journalist. Working for the
foreign press is a risky calling, as shown by the case of Zhao Yan, a researcher for the
New York Times, who is serving three years in prison. Through him, authorities are
apparently seeking to intimidate others who might want to work for the foreign press.
The official guide for journalists covering the Olympic Games recommends working with
accredited organizations to find a translator. This must absolutely not be done, since it
would mean employing a potential spy who would report everything the foreign journalist
says or does to his employer, and thus to the government.
A British journalists working on a story about preparations for the Olympics was forced to
change fixers twice, since those he employed were terrified by the idea of working on
subjects such as the illegal imprisonment of petitioners or dissidents.
Fixers are also essential to decipher the propaganda in the official media, which has
intensified on sensitive subjects like Tibet, the autonomous Xinjiang region or dissidents.
The government has prepared other obstacles for foreign journalists - the blocking of
hundreds of Internet information sites, particularly those of non-government organizations
and Chinese media abroad, the jamming of international radio stations and the bugging of
phones and other communications.
So that journalists will have no time to dig into sensitive topics, the organizers of the
Games are planning to inundate them with information and invitations that will keep them
busy round the clock.

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
37
The promise made in Moscow in 2001 by Wang Wei, Executive Vice President and
Secretary General of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games, to guarantee total
press freedom for the Games is a dead letter. It is for this reason that Reporters Without
Borders is campaigning against the Olympics - to remind the Chinese authorities of this
promise so cynically betrayed.
Foreign Correspondents Club of China:
unrecognized but listened to
Jocelyn Ford
Chair, Media Freedoms Committee,
Foreign Correspondents Club of China
The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China was started in 1981. I must admit that the
person sitting in front of you is from an illegal organization. We are not recognized by the
Chinese government. However, we do have interactions with government officials, which
is a change from the situation a few years back when our letters and protests about the
attention or arrest of a reporter, or something of that nature, would come back unopened.
Now, our communications are accepted. We don't usually get answers, but at least the
letters do not come back unopened.
We have about 320 correspondent members and some associates. We are a professional
organization but we also promote free exchange of information as well as professionalism.
I am the head of the Media Freedoms Committee. The committee has only existed for
three or four years and, when we started, we gave it the name “Professional Committee”
to hide our activities. But now I am comfortable to sit here and say that our name,
Freedoms Committee suggests that there is a more liberal feeling in Beijing now and that
it is expected that we as foreign correspondents should be pushing for these issues.
In 2006, I started doing surveys of the sorts of interference that foreign correspondents
face. And when I started doing this I realized that a lot of the correspondents who have
been in China for quite some time did not expect to be treated very well. In fact, we tried
to get information about any interference that would not be acceptable in an influential
democratic country and you would find people saying, “Oh well, I wasn't detained. My
personal freedom wasn't taken away. I wasn't allowed to speak to a news source, but
that's nothing so I didn't include it.”
And so in the second year of the survey, which was last year, we tried to make a greater
effort to define what interference in reporting is. Last year, we had several people who
were physically assaulted by thugs that we presume may have some relationship to the
government. Also, what has happened more recently is that a lot of our members are
stopped and asked for passports or residence permits, especially when we try to interview
someone the authorities do not want us to interview. That is a new form of interference.

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I will go back to 2006 to shed a little light about how the Chinese government has brought
these new regulations into effect. In the past, the Foreign Ministry did not recognize the
Foreign Correspondents Club. They still don't. We did not have any communication. We
had a meeting in the spring of 2006 which was quite interesting. We had three members
from the Foreign Correspondents Club and two people from the Foreign Ministry. That's
when they started to float a trial balloon about what we could consider to be free
reporting during the Olympics - or at least that is my interpretation.
Before, every time Beijing correspondents wanted to report in a local area we would have
to get permission from the local Foreign Ministry office. Of course, if you were going to
cover a sensitive topic, you wouldn't apply. It became a cat and mouse game. Some
people would go to an HIV-AIDS village in the middle of the night and then leave and
hope the authorities would not find them.
Then the Foreign Ministry suggested that rather than ask permission, you could send a fax
and inform the local foreign affairs office you are coming. We said, “Well, if it is
voluntary...”
They then came out with the new regulations, which are actually more liberal than we had
expected. It basically says that to interview organizations or individuals in China, foreign
journalists need only obtain their prior consent. And that is our key phrase. We advise
anyone going to China to carry a copy of the regulations. Download it from the Internet.
Carry it with you in Chinese and in English in case you run into obstacles. Of course, if
they really don't want you, they will just say “Well, we have a counter-regulation,” which
will not be produced. But give it a try.
We did a survey last July on how were these regulations were working. And we found
quite a few cases in which they had not been observed. We put out a statement ahead of
the Olympics saying that China had not yet met the requirements as we understood them.
The government was furious. They said, essentially, “Why don't you commend us for
making an effort and making these improvements.”
A couple of days later there was a glowing piece in English on the front page of the China
Daily saying how wonderful conditions were for foreign correspondents. Of course, not a
single correspondent was quoted in the story. That was their response.
We did find improvements. Conditions for foreign correspondents in China are better now
than they were before the regulations. However, they are nowhere near what one would
expect of an Olympic host nation.
In October, we sent a list of cases to the International Olympic Committee, including
examples of several journalists who had been assaulted, together with our
recommendations of how to improve working conditions. Basically we did not get a
response. One of our board members met in private with an IOC official and was told
there was nothing the committee could do.

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There has been progress due to the Olympics. We have a lot more press conferences now.
The government wants to say how many hundreds of events it organized, and we say,
“Yes, but the person up there didn't answer any questions.” However, some officials are
getting better at answering questions, but it is still a major problem.
There is a government information disclosure act that comes into force on May 1, and I
think this is a positive move but one that needs to be watched and tested very carefully,
hopefully by foreign correspondents as well as Chinese reporters or whoever else would
like to get information from the government.
There are areas that are very disturbing still. Journalists are still not free to travel to any
Tibetan regions. We have been told that the information about people convicted for
violations of state secrecy laws is being hidden.
Where do we go from here? One effort we are working on at the Foreign Correspondents
Club is a media rights campaign. We have members who have been illegally searched, or
who have had their materials taken illegally by authorities. Many foreign correspondents
are not aware of the legal rights they enjoy or should enjoy in China. Hopefully, we will be
providing more information about what these rights are and what correspondents should
do if someone in authority stops them.
We are also concerned about how to protect sources better. Are there legal means that
we can use when there are sources who want to speak to us and who are prevented from
doing so? What can we do to protect them if they get into trouble after we speak to them?
We also intend to bring up in discussions the increase in cyber-attacks against people who
speak out in favor of free media and free expression in China.

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China’s restricted BBC audience:
disliking what they can’t hear or see
Jon Williams
World News Editor, BBC News
There are a handful of countries where the BBC is not welcome - but not many where our
services on radio, television and on-line are actively blocked. For the BBC, reporting China
is a complicated affair at the best of times.
The BBC has been reporting from Beijing for more than 30 years. We’ve had what you
might call an “interesting” relationship with the authorities there. Most of the time, they’re
more than happy for us to tell the world about China - they are less keen on our telling
China about the world, and actively prevent us telling China about China.
On the one hand, when the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, visited Beijing in
January, the Foreign Ministry and the municipal government bent over backwards to
accommodate the BBC. They lit up Tiananmen Square at 6 o'clock in the morning to allow
us to broadcast our evening news live from Beijing - the first time they’d ever done so.
And yet, on radio, the BBC World Service is jammed, BBC World can only be viewed in
hotels and diplomatic compounds, and until last month, the BBC News web site was
blocked. Today, in Beijing, you can read the BBC News in English, but not in Mandarin.
And any time the BBC carries a television report about the situation in Tibet, the
transmission is interrupted.
Exactly a year ago, we moved our Asia/Pacific headquarters from Singapore to Beijing. It
was an important statement of intent - but also an investment in the story. We wanted to
capture a sense of the economic miracle that’s under way in urban China, the buzz and
the excitement around the Olympics - the BBC is the UK rights holder, and of course,
London is the host city for the Olympics in 2012.
That’s why we welcomed the liberalization of the rules governing foreign media introduced
by Premier Wen Jiabao in January last year. For the first time, we could go pretty much
anywhere, talk to anyone - all we needed was the permission of the individual we were
talking to. All of a sudden, China was like everywhere else. It transformed our ability to
tell the story. No longer was there a need to apply for bureaucratic permits to travel. The
result was more news about China. In January, across our radio, television and online
services, we proclaimed 2008 to be “The Year of China.” How right we were.
Then came the protests in March. All of a sudden, not just was Tibet closed to the BBC,
but so were many of the neighboring provinces. So much for Premier Wen’s order
liberalizing reporting. BBC correspondents and camera crews were stopped by police - we
spent a week trying to out-run the Public Security Bureau on the Tibetan plateau. Getting
accurate, first-hand reports out of Tibet has proved a real problem. Without our own
people on the ground, we’ve been largely reliant on accounts by witnesses. We have no

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means of independent verification. At one point, Premier Wen promised to take a group of
international media to Lhasa. The bad news is they decided not to invite the BBC.
The reason? Many in China are annoyed at the way the Western media have reported the
story. More than a million people have signed a petition complaining at the coverage on
channels like CNN and the BBC. The irony of course, is only a handful will actually have
been able to read or watch the BBC’s coverage themselves. Much of the BBC’s content
remains blocked.
So what should we expect in China in the summer? To some extent the jury is still out.
The situation in Tibet may have calmed down - order and a degree of equilibrium may
have been restored. But then we’ve seen the protests across Europe during the Olympic
torch relay. “Face” is everything to the Chinese. There’s no greater crime than to cause
China to lose face. And yet from Athens, to London, to Paris, Beijing has found itself
embarrassed, the Olympic torch the focus of dissent rather than celebration. So much for
“One World, One Dream.” What was supposed to be the year when China showed its best
face to the world, has seen parts of the globe turning its back on China.
There is one irony in all this. Just as the authorities in Beijing were interrupting
transmissions of BBC World and hunting down BBC correspondents in places like Gansu
province, they unblocked access to the English-language section of the BBC News web site
for the first time in a decade. We now have thousands of readers inside China. Typically,
fewer than 100 people read stories from Chinese computers - on the first day, that figure
jumped to more that more than 20,000 - not all that many in a country that boasts a
population of 1.3 billion. But it does provide a valuable, alternative perspective on the
protests and our reporting of them.
Beijing’s air and water:
call for long-term solutions, not quick fixes
Huang Xiaolu/Wang Weiluo
Environmental experts
Huang Xiaolu presented two summaries, on air and water quality in Beijing, by Dr. Wang
Weiluo, a Chinese engineer now living in Germany. He took part in the 1980s in the
Territorial Plan for the Three Gorges District where the controversial Three Gorges Dam on
the Yangtze was to be built. In his book, “Fortune and Misfortune,” he criticized many
aspects of the giant project’s flood control, navigation and resettlement policies.
Ms. Huang is the daughter of the late Huang Wanli (1911-2001), a distinguished professor
of water engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China’s most prestigious university.
He had predicted ecological disasters if the Three Gorges Dam were built. He was publicly
attacked, isolated and sent to hard labor over his opposition in the 1950s to the
Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River. After he argued that that dam was bound to fail,

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he was labeled by Mao Zedong personally as a "rightist." When he was sentenced to hard
labor near Sanmenxia during the Cultural Revolution, 1969-76, his predictions about the
dam had already been realized.
Subsequently, Prof. Huang wrote several times to the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo
on why the TGD should not be built and requesting that public input be allowed on its
feasibility. In late 1992, Prof. Huang wrote: "The TGD should never be built. It's not a
matter of building it now or later, or a matter of the country's financial situation. It is not a
simple matter of ecology, flood prevention, economic development, or national defense.
The physical condition of the evolving Yangtze River river bed and the river's current
economic value will not allow the existence of this dam. A democratic government that
respects science will not initiate this disastrous project. If the dam is built, eventually, it
will have to be destroyed."
Huang Xiaolu noted that then-President Bill Clinton had answered her father’s warning
messages on the Three Gorges but that nobody in authority in China had done so. She
said she hoped that foreign journalists going to the Olympics would also report on China’s
environmental problems - going, for example, to the Sanmen Gorge on the Yellow River,
where 300,000 inhabitants were forced to leave their homes to make way for the dam, or
that they would interview some of the million persons moved away for the Three Gorges.
Summaries of Dr. Wang’s articles follow:
Beijing’s air quality and the Olympic Games
The Chinese Communist government has already invested more than 120 billion yuan
(about $17 billion) to guarantee good air quality in Beijing during the Olympics. But the
results are not what was hoped for. That is why it will adopt some drastic measures that
will only have short-term effects. Under military surveillance, there is not really an
organized society. That is why radical measures are needed to improve air quality to make
it conform to standards, even if that quality is not destined to be long-lasting.
On Feb. 11, 2008, Zhang Lijun, the future deputy national environment minister, told two
press conferences that the government “will guarantee good air quality during the Olympic
Games.”
Zhang Lijun said that in July 2001, when Beijing presented its candidacy for the Olympics,
the government issued a solemn pledge on air quality during the Games. Three points
should be recalled. First, the city of Beijing committed itself to daily testing of the levels of
sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and airborne particles. Second, it promised
to work for overall environmental improvement. Third, measurements of the four kinds of
pollution above were to conform to national standards and indicative levels of the World
Health Organization, guaranteeing good air quality in Beijing during the Olympics.
Chinese officials consider that investing money is all that is needed to reach those goals,
But, while Deputy Minister Zhang Lijun spoke at the National People’s Palace by
Tienanmen Square, the sky overhead was as dark as ever.

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“Guaranteeing good air quality in Beijing during the Olympic Games” is the objective set
by the Chinese Communist government. That objective is stated far more specifically than
many planned goals previously set by this government - already a sign of progress. But if
one analyzes that objective, one finds that it is for a small area and for a short time and
that the criteria are not very exacting.
The area concerned is Beijing, whose surface is 16,800 square kilometers, The period is
that of the Games and will therefore be less than a month, or two, if one includes the
Para-Olympics. The criteria are that the air should be good, or more precisely, defined as
good, that is that the four indexes meet national standards and WHO norms.
China and the WHO have set a standard for air quality at the lowest level for human
health. If that standard is not met, air quality is to be ruled as not meeting the norms. If
the standard is met exactly, one might say that the air quality does indeed match the
norms, but it would still be far from good.
The lowering of values in Chinese society as a whole follows the lowering of values for the
Chinese Communist Party elite. These include not cheating on one’s wife, not using
narcotics, not gambling and not accepting commissions or tips of more than 10,000 yuan
(about $1,400). It is a code of conduct applicable to all ordinary citizens. Thus, the
standard-setters consider that if the air quality merely meets the minimal norms, that
would mean that it is good. That approach is in strict keeping with Chinese social doctrine.
Originally, it was a goal to normalize air pollution. The idea was that by Year X, the
Chinese capital would enjoy Y days of clear blue skies. For example, in 2007 the number
of blue-sky days in Beijing was 246 – 64.7 per cent of the year, surpassing the planned
objective. But how is blue sky defined? It is considered that a dark blue sky is a blue sky,
but what about a cloudy sky? One could define a dark sky as “gray,” but one could also
call it “blue-gray.” One could even call it a “gray-blue.” In August 2006, when I visited
from Germany, friends said we were lucky to have specially good weather because it had
rained a lot before our arrival in Beijing, clearing the air. But I thought the sky was dark,
and the sun looked out of focus, like an oncoming car’s headlight on a foggy night. I only
saw a really blue sky again upon my return to Germany.
To meet the objective of “guaranteeing good air quality in Beijing during the Olympic
Games,” the Chinese government has already invested 120 billion yuan. That sum is
obviously not counted in the budget of the Games. It exceeds the government’s pledged
investment budget and the projected profits.
To deal with the problem of air pollution in Beijing, the government has adopted several
measures, some of which involve long-term air quality improvement; others are merely
short-term.
The first category of measures consists mainly of moving polluting factories and
businesses from the city center, of adopting heat exchange generators, of converting from
coal to electricity for cooking and heating, of imposing use of air or particle filters on
automobiles, of increasing the capital’s green spaces, etc. Amongst those measures there

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are also some involving outlying areas and others to prevent and control sandstorms and
to halt desert growth.
Moving polluting factories and businesses to outlying areas is not a sound measure.
Western industrial countries took such measures in the 1960s and 1970s to solve the
problem of big-city pollution. It was later realized that this just meant shifting the pollution
elsewhere. Further, the outlying areas have populations less sensitized to environmental
concerns than those of big cities. Outlying populations are also smaller, meaning that they
can apply less political pressure and have fewer means to press for sound pollution
management. So, Western industrialized countries no longer take such measures (but they
don’t hesitate to transfer such polluting enterprises to developing countries).
The second category of measures includes a ban on large numbers of vehicles entering
the capital before and during the Games, while Beijing-based vehicles would be allowed to
circulate only every other day on a system of alternating authorizations for odd- and evennumbered
license plates. There are also to be measures halting or limiting the activities of
enterprises in outlying areas. The provinces of Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Shandong are
also to apply pollution limits on coal burning, depending on the air quality in Beijing. Such
measures will only be short-term and will improve air quality just during the Games, and
they will have small effects.
Measures of that kind are like military surveillance. They are drastic. As we all know, when
there is military surveillance, there is really no societal self-regulation.
Actually, a major reason why it is hard to improve air quality radically in Beijing is the
capital’s wild, uncontrolled growth, which explains why the sky is there is always so dark.
The measures called for do not address that problem. If nothing is done about it, even
investing even more than yet another 120 billion yuan would not suffice.
Still, Beijing’s general plan formed a basis for an air quality improvement model. It
provided for decentralization, making the old city the core and transforming the 10
outlying areas into urban districts, including Beiyuan Park (Northern Park), Nanyuan Park
(Southern Park), the Shijingshan (Stone Mountain) amusement park, and the
Dingfuzhuang suburb. Each district is to be separated by a green belt, and the plan would
be extended to the city’s new areas.
In fact, Beijing’s development has been chaotic. Its actual development has outstripped
the general plan. Initially, there was only a single peripheral zone, then a second, followed
by construction of a third, fourth, and fifth. A sixth is being built.
At the start of the People’s Republic in 1949, Beijing had 2 million inhabitants. Now, it has
16 million. In 1949, there was about 20 million square meters of buildings. Today, there is
on average more than 10 million square meters of construction completed annually - half
the equivalent of the original Beijing every year. The original plan projected that by 2010,
the overall built-up surface would be 360 million square meters, but that seems already
to have been overtaken. More than 100 million square meters are currently under
construction. In 1990, more than 600 square kilometers were filled with buildings. In

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2000, there was a growth of 750 square kilometers, while in 2010, development should
reach 900 kilometers.
Since the policy of economic reform and openness, development has been presented as a
positive principle and underdevelopment as the greatest evil. And so the drawbacks of
Beijing’s uncontrolled growth were ignored.
If one goes to the Google Earth site on the Internet, one can see on the satellite photos of
Beijing that the city is covered with an enormous cloud. It is what is commonly known as
the urban climate effect or the effect of urban heat pockets. The clearest sign of such heat
pockets is that downtown temperatures are higher than suburban ones, with differences
of as much as 6 degrees Centigrade. Buildings are concentrated, and the unbuilt surfaces
are made up mostly of tarred and cemented streets. At night, cities release accumulated
heat more slowly than suburbs. According to German research, urban heat pockets result
in 5 to 15 per cent less sunshine, temperatures can rise as much as 10 degrees
Centigrade, the number of foggy days rises by 30 to 100 per cent, etc.
Urban fog covers are formed, made up of water vapor and particles. Those fog covers
impede the exchange of air between the cities and their surroundings. Motor vehicles,
industrial production and human activity produce great quantities of gasses, cinders and
dust. When they reach the fog covers, they can no longer dissipate, and they stagnate in
the polluted air. So in Beijing the sky is dark and the sun is unclear.
Of course, there are city planning measures that could counteract or even avert such
effects. Beijing’s growth has taken place chaotically and in concentric rings. If the Chinese
government does not deal with Beijing’s uncontrolled growth, it will not be able to counter
the emergence of urban heat pockets, and improvement of the capital’s air quality will
become an impossible goal.
Can the effects of urban heat pockets be countered during the Olympics? If the weather is
favorable, there will be heavy rains that would dissipate Biejing’s fog cover before the
Games. That would renew air circulation; noxious gasses and particles would diminish; the
air would clear; and the sky would brighten. If rains continue at regular intervals during
the Games, they would prevent urban heat pockets from reforming. But the government
does not want abundant rain before or during the Games. It has planned on system of
radars, cannons and planes to try to disperse rain clouds. Rains would be seen as bad
omens. Yet, if there is no rain, heat accumulations would become critical and could
prevent improvements in air quality. It could even produce unexpected consequences.
Beijing’s water supply crisis
In addition to Beijing’s air quality problem, there is its water supply problem. The Chinese
government has urgently brought in 1.6 billion cubic meters of water from provinces like
Hebei that are even more arid than Beijing. The basic cause of Beijing’s drought is the
uncontrolled exploitation of its water supply. If it continues unchecked, the need to move
the capital city could become inevitable. All the investments for the 2008 Olympic Games
would then have gone to waste.

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Of all the world’s great metropolises, Beijing has the worst water problem. Beijing is said
to need annually 1 billion cubic meters of water more than it has. The government
undertook an emergency water supply program for the Olympics. It transferred 600
million cubic meters from the Yellow River to Lake Baiyangding in Hebei Province. Then, 1
billion cubic meters was transferred from the four reservoirs of Hebei to Beijing. In fact,
the water shortage in the neighboring provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Henan is
more worrisome than Beijing’s shortfall.The transfer of 1.6 billion cubic meters from Hebei
to Beijing surely risks creating great difficulties or worse for that province.
Beijing’s natural water supply conditions are in fact not so bad. Average annual rainfall in
Beijing is 625 millimeters - slightly more than for Paris, Berlin, Moscow or Warsaw. The
population density of those capitals is about the same or even somewhat more than
Beijing’s and nobody says that they face water shortages.
A UNESCO study sets a criterion to determine whether the natural environment of an
urban zone is arid or not. It is based on the volume of surface flow of the local water
courses. If it is more than 150 millimeters, the natural ecological system can bear the
strain of human activity. In Beijing, the flow is 243 millimeters, so conditions are relatively
good. But only 39 per cent of the annual rainfall is counted in that flow, while in Germany
80 per cent is counted in calculating local water resources. If the German calculation
method were used, the water flow in Beijing would be 500 millimeters. This shows that
the Chinese capital’s natural water “shortage” is more a question of definition than reality.
In fact, one of the main reasons Beijing was chosen as the capital is that its water supply
was good. Beijing faces the Yanshan mountain chain and a plain, and numerous rivers
cross the capital. One traditional history says of Beijing: “There are rivers and lakes
everywhere, springs spouting pure water and humid soil.” Many place names in the city
are water-related. Beijing is surrounded by lakes, rivers and streams. If not for the rivers,
China’s emperors would not have chosen Beijing for their capital.
The Yongding is the main river crossing Beijing. The Guanting Reservoir, with a capacity of
4.16 billion cubic meters, is on it. The Chaobai River is another of the capital’s major water
courses, with the Miyun Reservoir, whose capacity is 4.375 billion cubic meters. The two
reservoirs could supply more than 2 billion cubic meters annually, satisfying most of
Beijing’s needs. Yet the Yonding River has been shrinking since the 1960s.The Guanting
Reservoir used to get 1.41 billion cubic meters annually, compared to .3 billion cubic
meters now. If one also considers water pollution, Guanting’s water can no longer serve
as the capital’s source of drinking water. The Miyun Reservoir’s annual inflow has declined
from 1,49 billion cubic meters to .6 to .8 billion.In 2003, Beijing used 3.58 cubic meters,
of which only .85 billion cubic meters came from surface waters and the rest from
underground water sources. The calculation is simple: the Yongding and Chaobai Rivers
have lost 2 billion cubic meters in annual water flow. The Nanshuibeidiao (“bringing
southern waters to the north”) Project is planned to transfer 1.7 billion cubic meters of
water to Beijing - not enough to cover the annual shortfall of the two main rivers.
Why have those two rivers lost so much water? It is because they have been overused.
The government’s construction of the Guanting Reservoir on the Yongding was no

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problem. But the government later built 541 other reservoirs along the river! Five large
reservoirs were also built along the Chaobai. Foreign experts calculate that diversion from
a water course should be no more than 15 per cent of its total volume. Some Chinese
experts calculate 40 per cent. Exploitation of the Yongding and Chaobai Rivers has far
exceeded 100 per cent of annual volumes. Instead of supplying Beijing, they have been
diverted to supplying upstream reservoirs, so creating a serious water shortage for Beijing.
The more numerous the reservoirs are, the greater are losses through evaporation. If
each of the 542 upstream reservoirs is responsible for just a .3 per cent increased
evaporation loss of the Yongding’s total water flow, that alone explains 80 per cent of its
reduction in volume. The water shortages in Beijing’s neighboring provinces of Tianjin and
Hebei are also attributable to that overuse of water resources.
So why really did the Chinese government urgently transfer 1.6 billion cubic meters of
water to Beijing? Was it to guarantee that Beijing would have enough water to drink
during the Games? Just a small fraction of Beijing’s water is for drinking. And foreign
athletes in Beijing will not be drinking faucet water. They will probably bring their own
water, as, for instance, the German women’s soccer football team.
The Chinese government’s real reason for the urgent transfer of so much water to Beijing
is to hold “green” Olympics. As noted earlier, the River Yongding has shrunk every year.
The river bed inside the capital’s city limits has been dry for more than 30 years. Water
from neighboring regions will be used to clean the polluted river bed. Then, using dikes
made of oak bark, ponds will be created to give the Games a “greener” ambience. A
number other streams, like the Juma, and various of the capital’s lakes need to have their
waters replaced to give them a clean aspect. Because of the worrisome lowering of
underground water, giant funnels have formed. To be sure that stream beds like the
Yongding are filled during the Games, enormous quantities of water will be needed since a
great deal of it is likely to seep underground. Beijing has also built a large number of new
basins and fountains. The best-known basin, needing the greatest amount of water, is in
front of the National Opera. The amount of water needed for those basins is considerable.
Beijing also needs water to clean its dusty streets, soiled in this year’s sandstorms.
The Chinese capital’s water shortage is mainly due to inconsiderate use of available
supplies. If such policies continue, Beijing’s water situation is likely to deteriorate, and it
might inevitably become necessary to move the capital. Then, all of China’s investments
for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games would have gone for naught.
What is the Beijing that China wants to show the world as athletes gather there from all
over in August 2008? They should be allowed to see the true face of Beijing and of China.
Because of massive overuse of water resources, the River Yongding was dried up, the
River Chaobai was shrunk, Beijing’s water was polluted. Allowing people to see such
realities is not a dishonor. The Chinese government could then change its policies and
start restoring Beijing’s ecology – reviving its rivers, cleaning up the water pollution and
dealing with the environment on scientific lines. If the Chinese government had started to
restore the rivers in the 1980s, then more than 20 years of effort would have avoided the
current annual shortage of a billion cubic meters of water. Better late than never.

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Panel 4
Trading with China:
risks, responsibilities & opportunities
moderator: Sharon Hom
Executive Director, Human Rights in China
Matchmaking human rights
and business interests
Kathryn Dovey
Program Manager, Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights
In 2003, the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights published a document called the UN
Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business
Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights. This, for the first time, was a set of human
rights standards aimed directly at businesses which took for their reference international
human rights treaties.
What happened as a result was a fairly polarized debate. On one side, a number of
companies said human rights was for governments and not really any of their business.
On the other side, there were NGOs that said the measure did not go far enough.
There were obviously variations. A number of companies, not many, were behind the idea
of at least trying to clarify the issue.
Two months before the UN document came out, seven multinational corporations set up
the Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights. It is chaired by Mary Robinson, the
former President of Ireland and the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Today, 13 companies belong to the Initiative. To focus their work, the companies took the
UN norms document and tried to road test it to see if it would work in a business context.
Part of this effort involved developing tools that companies could use to try to translate
human rights into a business context, while using business-friendly language. One of
those tools was a matrix published in 2003 - in which we took the contents of the norms
and then divided corporate actions into essential, expected and desirable - with a number
of examples in the various boxes - that companies can use for reference.
The Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights has a variety of industry sectors meeting
together and that would not ordinarily sit around the same table, meeting together on
these issues - the pharmaceutical sector, the apparels sector, mining, oil, information
technology and others. The idea is that, together, they can explore the common dilemmas
over the relations between human rights and business concerns and seek solutions.

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We work with legal advisers and try very much to bring human rights to a business
audience. One of the main publications on which we worked. A Guide for Integrating
Human Rights into Business Management - also available in Chinese - quite simply takes
the elements of a standard management system and explains how human rights slots into
it. It explains things you need to be looking out for, but also the kinds of opportunities to
be found in this area.
Throughout 2006-2009, the second stage of the project, we have been delving deeper
into more thematic areas, toward the difficult questions, looking at the issue of emerging
economies, at the question of accountability and good governance in sensitive countries.
What we have been seeing particularly over the last year is increased interest from
governments on this issue, Ironically, some companies, not all by any means, are more
advanced on this subject than governments are.
Prof. John G. Ruggie, was appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2005 as the
UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights. This appointment arose out of
the debate surrounding the UN Norms. Professor Ruggie was appointed to do some
mapping in this area and to understand it better.
Ruggie's mandate included identifying corporate responsibility standards, elaborating the
role of the states, building human rights impact assessments, as well as compiling a
compendium of best practices.
His latest report proposes a framework for action, based on three elements - protect,
respect and remedy - which it is hoped will be endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council
in June 2008.
Protection is about what states should be doing in relation to companies. Because states
have signed the international treaties, they have an obligation to ensure that other actors,
including companies, are not violating human rights.
Respect, which is the most interesting for us, is about the corporate responsibility to
respect human rights, that is not to violate them.
Remedy, also extremely important, is about access to justice when human rights violations
do occur.
I should mention for those of you who are journalists an excellent web site called The
Business and Human Rights Resources Center (www.business-humanrights.org), where
you will find stories about violations relating to companies and the responses from those
companies, in a very balanced debate.
There is a great deal happening in sector-specific areas - pharmaceutical companies
looking at the right to health; information technology companies and freedom of
information; apparel companies and their supply chains. It is important to note, however,

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that all human rights can be relevant to all companies in this debate, even if they might be
most interested in delving deeper on issues that relate specifically to their own industries.
Also of interest is the role of the industry bodies such as the International Chamber of
Commerce or the International Organization of Employers. These traditionally conservative
bodies in December 2006 produced a report for John Ruggie, which noted that in weak
governance zones, if the law is insufficient, companies should be making reference to
international human rights standards.
Another point worth questioning is the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes: What are
governments saying to other governments and what should they be saying? And how
transparent should they be?
Within the Business Leaders' Initiative on Human Rights, there are two sponsors of the
Olympic Games, Coca Cola and General Electric. What is their role? What is their
responsibility? These are difficult questions.
Despite a lot of good work so far on the relationship between business and human rights,
there is still much to do. There are many companies that are not yet engaged in these
issues. Nevertheless, over the last three years we have seen huge progress toward
greater consciousness of the business-human rights relationship.
A Chinese Puzzle:
to Google or not to Google ?
Robert O. Boorstin
Director, Corporate & Policy Communications, Google
The kinds of problems I am going to talk about are not confined to China. We have had
them in Thailand, in Turkey, in Pakistan - all over the world. Basically, wherever there is a
government that is not fond of free expression, we have a problem. We have these
problems every week, sometimes every day. And we are learning slowly, as a company
that is not yet 10 years old, how to deal with these questions.
Ours is quite a dynamic industry and a moving target, which is something I think everyone
has to understand from the beginning. What is today's technology that can get you
through a firewall may be useless tomorrow or may in fact be adopted by a government
tomorrow and turned around on you. And so a great deal of the solutions that people
have come up with turn out to be great for several months and then not to work anymore.
I am going to focus my presentation on four questions. Why do we operate in China?
What responsibilities do we have? What challenges do we face? And what would you do?
Why do we operate in China? Let me not be disingenuous here. We operate in China
because we are a business. There are 230 million, at last count, Internet users in China.

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There are 400 million mobile phones, soon to be 600 million in a couple of years. And that
means good business for companies in the information and technology sector if they can
thread the needle and figure out how to operate in China. And that is very difficult to do.
The second reason we are there is because we view it as part of our mission to organize
the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful to people. If we were to
ignore 1.3 billion people, that would mean that we would not be doing our mission very
well. The more accurate question when I say why do we do business there is really why
do we operate Google.cn, which is our Chinese domain? In a perfect world, there would
be one Google, Google.com, that showed everything that everyone in the world had
access to. Unfortunately, that world does not exist. And the reason that we operate
Google.cn, and I'll give you a little history behind this, is simply that we really did not have
any choice if we wanted to operate in China.
Google had and still has Google.com in Chinese. And for a long time you could actually see
it when you were inside China. Then over the course of about a year it started to
disappear. People were having great trouble getting to it, or seeing it at all. And for those
who did get through, it was degraded severely. It was very slow in coming up. People got
very impatient and over time the company realized that our service was being strangled,
and that if we were going to continue to have a service in China, we would have to come
up with something else.
There was a year-long debate inside Google - and I should say that the debate still
continues - over whether or not we should be operating within the Chinese government's
rules. Ultimately, we made the decision that we would start Google.cn under the selfcensorship
rules that the Chinese government imposes for any company that operates this
kind of service.
The best way to think about why we did this is to imagine that you were given the chance
to open a public library for 230 million people, and you were told you could issue all these
library cards, but you could not show the people the back room. There was one room in
that library with materials they could not see, but they could see 98 per cent of the
materials that were available. That really was the choice that we faced. Either we opened
Google.cn and we gave people access to 98 per cent of what we could get up on Google,
or they could see nothing at all. Again, remember how degraded our service had become
there. It was a critical reason why we set this up.
What responsibilities do we have as a company operating there? Let me focus on just a
few. We think that our duty as a company is to maximize freedom of expression and
access to information. I think that is pretty clear in our mission, and I think the word
maximize is critical here. Again, in a perfect world one would not have to use that word.
One would be able to say we are going to give everything to everyone. But in this case in
order to operate, what we tried to do was to give people the most that was possible under
the local circumstances.
A second responsibility we believe we have is transparency, that is to tell people when
they are not getting the full story. And so from the beginning, when Google.cn went live,

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we have had a statement at the bottom of the page, when you make a certain search,
which tells you that certain search sites or results have been eliminated because of
government regulations. We thought that was a very important thing to tell people. Was it
a perfect solution? No, but at least it was a partial solution.
A third responsibility we have is to protect our users' personally identifiable information
and their privacy. And that is why from the beginning we have not put information on
servers in China that could be linked to people directly. It is why we do not offer gmail or
blogger services in China, because if we were to do so we would end up with a situation
where the government could come to us and demand information and could shut us down
if we did not turn it over. We have chosen not to put ourselves in that situation.
A fourth responsibility is to challenge the government when we think that they are making
an unreasonable request or when it simply makes sense to do so to find out more about
what the regulations are. Some of the regulations are very hard to interpret, to
understand. And so we try to ask as often as we can how they will apply.
Finally, not only in China but also outside that country, we feel that have a responsibility
to press for human rights in as many forums as we can.
What challenges do we face in China? Well they are innumerable. We face a difficult
market, one that is hard to understand. We do not know with the government where we
stand from day to day. We face a huge number of regulations and licensing problems. You
would be surprised at the number of lawyers and the number of Google employees that
are involved in simply getting us to certain stages where we are able to offer services.
We face what I can only call a bias towards Chinese companies. This is one story that I
will tell. Back in October of 2007 there was I guess what you can call the perfect storm.
Within a couple of weeks the National People’s Congress happened, we opened a YouTube
Taiwan channel - that's always helpful in Beijing - and the Congress in the United States
awarded the Medal of Freedom to the Dalai Lama. All within two weeks. And we noticed
suddenly that all of Google's traffic, all of Yahoo's traffic and all of MSN traffic had been
redirected to Baidu (the Chinese search engine), and it remained that way for 18 hours. I
thought that was a fairly simple thing to interpret myself. But that is the kind of challenge
that we do face. When you typed in Google, you got Baidu. And that's quite an interesting
moment for any company to be dealing with.
Finally - and this is something I would say is not unique to Google but certainly we have
an unusual volume of it - we have a lot of internal questioning among our employees.
There was a great deal of controversy about our operations there and a great deal of
discussion still goes on within the company. We think that this is pretty healthy and it
keeps us on our toes. And we also think it is healthy because we said when we went in
with Google.cn that we would constantly review our operations, depending on how
conditions in China changed.
Let me end with the last question. What would you do? Put yourselves in the shoes of
somebody who is facing a situation, let's say in Thailand, where the government has shut

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down all of YouTube because of four videos that have offended the king. Do you make the
choice of taking YouTube down and showing nothing? Or do you talk to the government,
negotiate and eventually take down the four videos so that YouTube can be broadcast
again? That is the kind of question we face every day, and it is the kind of question that I
think we all should be thinking about.
Doing business in China:
upfront on compromises
Peter Scheer
Executive Director, California First Amendment Coalition
A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the
United States to become the biggest Internet market in the world. At 225 million users,
and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s Internet is a business opportunity so grand
and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises
that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.
I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices
of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing Internet search results for
searches performed inside China - within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship,
as it is called - with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and
therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable
candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo
search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong.”
Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in
the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the
demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they
nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the
mere act of typing a few search terms into an Internet-connected computer. So seductive
are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even
hardened litigators into wimps.
In conversations with Internet entrepreneurs and investors active in China, one often
hears arguments that are more rationalization than logic. An Internet CEO recently told
me that freedom of speech is a “relative” value that, despite its appeal in Western
democracies, is not appropriate to China. Popular variations on this theme are that
freedom of speech is not an affordable luxury in a country that must be single-minded in
its pursuit of economic development; that the people of China are more interested in
consumer goods than personal and political freedom; and that Westerners’ pressure on
China to be more tolerant of dissent is a form of cultural imperialism.

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Let’s be clear: freedom of speech, freedom of political choice, and the rule of law are not
relative values; they are absolutes. China’s regime of Internet censorship is, without
question, a crime against individual liberty on a truly mass scale. That it coexists with a
fast-modernizing economy offering its people considerable choice in the economic sphere
only makes the curtailment of personal freedom more offensive because less excusable.
China does not need to suppress speech to achieve its economic goals. China’s leaders are
more cynical than that. They maintain censorship solely to preempt challenges to their
monopoly on political power.
This can be seen in the government’s censorship policies. Web sites based inside China
are subject to content restrictions that are, by design, so uncertain and unpredictable that
they force Internet companies to censor themselves. Standards that are unknown and
unknowable, backed by the threat of license revocation for companies and jail for
individuals, create a pervasive fear that is far more effective than direct regulation at
muting opposition to the government and its policies.
Web sites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewal,l
based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary
online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all
blogging services, Wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (Wikileaks included), social
networking web sites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing
and video-sharing businesses - in other words, the full panoply of Internet 2.0
technologies.
Web sites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities
as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and
anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police.
What should American Internet companies do? To point out that doing business in China
is morally compromising is not to say that companies must forswear the world’s biggest
market - hardly a realistic option, in any event, for premier Internet firms like Google,
Yahoo, MSN, and Amazon. And while these companies might prefer to compete in China
remotely - basing their servers outside the Great Firewall - government policies force them
to set up shop inside China.
Those policies manipulate the firewall to degrade the performance of web sites based
outside China. Because all data from foreign web sites pass through bottlenecks
connecting China’s Internet with the outside world, and because sensors at those
bottlenecks further degrade transmissions across the firewall, non-Chinese web sites are
experienced from inside China as performing v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
This performance deficit is so substantial - and puts non-Chinese web sites at such a huge
disadvantage relative to their competitors inside China - that foreign web sites must
establish a presence inside the firewall. Indeed, Google, despite misgivings, established
Google.cn within China in 2007 mainly for this reason, while Yahoo and Amazon crossed
the firewall by investing in their Chinese domestic rivals.

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American Internet companies doing business in China should, for starters, acknowledge
the extent of their self-censorship, not hide it or rationalize it or pretend that it is
something other than the intensely unpleasant compromise that it is. Spare us the
tortured and hypocritical justifications. It helps for companies to admit their complicity; to
clarify that all is not as it should be or appears to be; to openly assert their disagreement
with Chinese government policies (if they do, indeed, disagree); and to disclose specifics
about how their content has been altered to avoid displeasing authorities.
US firms also should do everything they reasonably can to protect their Chinese customers
from the surveillance - and worse - of Chinese government authorities. If customer data
and identifying information can be stored outside the firewall, beyond the reach of
Chinese regulators and courts, they should be, even though that may involve greater
costs. While this step does not assure protection of anonymous users (since control of a
company’s license to operate in China gives the government considerable de facto
leverage, quite apart from territorial limits on subpoenas and other legal processes), it is
still meaningful.
If off-shoring of confidential user information is not feasible, companies must take steps to
warn their customers about the risks of using their service. And finally, where warnings
are not possible or go unheeded, companies should force customers to give their real
names when using their web sites - which will, in turn, force users to think carefully about
what they say or do online. Ironically, the barring of anonymity is the surest means of
getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn’t want to hear.
Doing business on China’s Internet is a messy, though potentially very lucrative, activity.
Some companies may be so put off by the messiness that they stay away. For most,
however, that is not a viable option. They must learn to be both honest with themselves
and honest with their customers.
The Red Hacker Alliance
and the Year of the Gh0st RAT
Gregory Walton
Asia Editor, Infowar Monitor
I am going to talk about Chinese cyber-espionage directed against non-state actors,
including several of the sponsors of this conference. I had intended to talk about an
entirely different topic, but two weeks ago a targeted malware attack against the World
Association of Newspapers, and the organizers of this conference specifically persuaded
me that this would be a topical subject to address.
My presentation is entitled, “Year of the Gh0st RAT,” and for those who are wondering,
this refers to a Remote Administration Tool that we have seen used in these attacks.
The presentation is divided into two distinct parts. In the first I very briefly outline the

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technology behind these attacks on our organizations. In the second I part I try to address
the question that journalists most often ask, that is, “Who is responsible?”
I have subdivided the technology section to include comments on: the message that
carries the exploit, the exploit itself, the back door, the control connection, and the control
server. Similarly, I have subdivided the second section to consider whether the attackers
have government affiliation, the state’s cost-benefit analysis in allowing hackers to operate
within its borders, the political context, and evidence of recruitment from China’s
computer underground.
First, the message designed to carry the payload. The content is to persuade the user to
click on it, so the malicious code can execute. The writing style of the message content
imitates the spoofed sender. The content of the document is appropriate to the topic of
the e-mail message. In some cases, users are convinced to return a message back to the
attacker or forward to other users. We have seen memes 1 redistributed to the targeted
communities. For example, a Word document was collected from a compromised mailing
list, edited to include an exploit, and forwarded to other members of the targeted
community.
Here is a sample of a message that transports a targeted attack:
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 02:22:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Beijing Conference
Subject: Invitation to conference "Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom"
To: ……….
Dear Sir/Madam
We are cordially inviting you to the conference "Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom" which
will be held from the 18th - 19th of April, 2008 in Maison de la Chimie Paris.
[…]
The schedule of the conference is in the attachment.
Email ……..@wan.asso.fr OR
………@wan.asso.fr
By TEL: +33 (0)1 47 42 85 37
By FAX +33 (0)1 47 42 49 48
This message was sent to potential participants of this conference. The English is good,
the message is factually correct, the organization’s footers are correct. The recipient is
encouraged to download a pdf attachment. The attachment exploits a client-side
vulnerability. The most common attack vectors so far have been, CHM help files, Adobe
Acrobat Reader, PDF, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Access. The file then
exploits the vulnerability, and executes shell code which usually unpacks two components:
the actual Trojan, and a non-malicious file which, rather than crashing the system, opens
a non-malicious file.

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The non-malicious file tends to be relevant to the message content, such as a Power Point
presentation on Tibet. In the background of a landscape, it dropped a Trojan. The file had
already been circulated in the Tibetan community, and this an example of attackers
appropriating existing message content and republishing it with an embedded Trojan.
Such activity is a strong indication that mailing lists and forums have previously been
compromised, and the attackers are recycling information.
It is important to realize that such low-volume malware attacks, such as used in cyberespionage,
have poor anti-virus coverage. In this case, only six out of 32 (18.75 per cent)
of anti-virus programs detected the Trojan
Researchers working on analyzing these attacks have identified at least eight different
Trojan families. Common ones include, Enfal, Riler and Protux. Control over some
machines is maintained using the Gh0st RAT remote administration tool. Gh0st RAT allows
essentially unrestricted access to the compromised machine. Remember, many machines
targeted in these incidents are home desktops, which provide the attacker with access to
the administrator account.
The next stage is for the Trojan to connect back to the control server. This usually
consists of two steps: domain name server (DNS) lookup to get the address of the control
server, and the actual connection. The DNS lookup comes from a host-name embedded in
the Trojan. To date, researchers have tracked more than 50 unique host-names. Some are
used once against a single targeted organization, others are reused against multiple
targets, as we will see in a moment.
The overwhelming majority of control servers were identified as being located on People’s
Republic of China netblocks. The host-names pointing to these servers are, more often
than not, configured on dynamic DNS services such as 3322.org. It should be noted, that
while these services are not in themselves malicious, they are frequently used in these
types of attacks. Interestingly, it appears for now that at least some of these control
servers have themselves been compromised.
Let us now turn to look at some concrete examples of actual control servers behind these
attacks. I will use examples from organizations sponsoring today’s conference. An attack
on the World Association of Newspapers was traced to www.vic2088.com, which is currently
202.155.203.250, hosted at a company in Hong Kong.
An attack on Reporters Sans Frontières: hi222.3322.org (117.14.210.181) on port 143 was
traced to the following:
inetnum: 117.8.0.0 - 117.15.255.255
netname: CNCGROUP-TJ
descr: CNC Group Tianjin province network
descr: China Network Communications Group Corporation
descr: No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street,
descr: Beijing 100031
country: CN

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An attack on the the Committee to Protect Journalists was traced to cvnxus.8800.org
It is interesting to note that this server has been used in past hacker intrusions traced by
US law enforcement to China.
Human Rights in China intercepted just two targeted e-mail attacks in 2006, and by the
end of last year that had grown to 40. In the first three months of 2008, the group
received more than 100 such targeted attacks.
Based on technical data such as this, it is not possible to say who is responsible for these
attacks, but if we take an inter-disciplinary approach and consider these incidents from a
social science as well as a computer security perspective, we can reach tentative
conclusions.
Let us now consider who is responsible for these ongoing attacks against non-state actors
that so effectively challenge the Chinese government’s legitimacy.
While the People’s Liberation Army established its first cyber-warfare units (zixunhua
budui) in 2003 - and we can assume the Chinese Ministry of State Security is also active in
this field - I will focus my comments on the what is called the “Red Hacker Alliance.”
One of the key questions in research by Scott Henderson is whether the groups that make
up the Red Hacker Alliance are officially exploited by the Chinese state. Henderson is a
former US Army intelligence officer who focuses a blog - www.thedarkvisitor.com/ - on
what Chinese hackers are up to. He asks, is tasking, oversight and control of the
organization in the hands of the central government? Henderson’s simple answer is that
the Red Hacker Alliance is not part of the government. He sees them as just who they
claim to be: an independent confederation of patriotic Chinese youth committed to
defending the motherland from what it sees as threats to national pride.
No one working with Open Source intelligence has been able to yet substantiate the claim
that there is direct government oversight of the Red Hacker Alliance. On the contrary,
there is a significant weight of evidence to suggest that the organization is a non-state
actor. However, it has been argued that the couching of the terms of this inquiry is flawed
- a simple negative answer is highly misleading.
The essential difficulty with the thought processes behind our inquiry is that we tend to
considering the issue from a Western, liberal, democratic conception of the nation-state -
leading to a position where we are susceptible to cultural bias. Many authors have made it
clear that in Chinese society acting independently of the government does not imply
disconnection from the State.
The Chinese government regards its people as an essential component of what it calls,
“comprehensive national power” and as critical to national security. The “masses” are
prominent in China's strategic thinking and will be aggressively deployed in both war and
peacetime. Therefore, to argue that the Red Hacker Alliance is a non-state actor is
basically true; it is also highly misleading. It would suggest that the hackers are not
working with the government’s intelligence bureaucracy. This would also be wrong. The

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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tendency to seek a simple “yes” or “no” to our inquiry may reflect a mirror-imaging of
societal norms where there are none. From a liberal, democratic point of view, espionage
targeting of another state involves government direction and supervision. It is unnatural
for Westerners to conceive of linkages between state actors and freelance intelligence
operations. It does not conform to our notions of an appropriate relationship.
Henderson argues, however, that this is very probably the type of relationship the
government has formed with the Red Hacker Alliance. Western governments do not
systematically apportion intelligence-gathering roles to non-state actors, even in times of
war. The Chinese government, however, and the People’s Liberation Army in particular
highlight the integration of military and civilian roles even in their contemporary doctrine
of “local war under modern high-tech conditions”:
“In the high-tech local war which we will face in the future, the role of the masses
as the main body of the war is embodied by the country. The great power of the
people’s war is released through comprehensive national power, the combination of
peacetime and war time, the combinations of the military and the civilian, and the
combination of war actions and non-war actions. Besides the direct participation
and cooperation with the army’s operations in the region where war happens, the
masses will support the war.”
China retains the idea of a “people’s war” in which the masses are mobilized to fight
shoulder to shoulder with regular military forces. There is considerable evidence to
suggest that the Red Hacker Alliance will actively engage in targeting Western
organizations - that is, being a non-state actor will not inhibit their participation in attacks
- preemptive or retaliatory.
The question we must ask then, is what form would these freelance intelligence-gathering
operations take? An interview with a hacker from Beijing provides a good example of what
Henderson refers to as a “non-traditional relationship”:
“One Beijing hacker says two Chinese officials approached him a couple of years ago
requesting ‘help in obtaining classified information’ from foreign governments. He says he
refused the ‘assignment,’ but admits he perused a top US general's personal documents
once while scanning for weaknesses in Pentagon information systems ‘for fun.’ The
hacker, who requested anonymity to avoid detection, acknowledges that Chinese
companies now hire people like him to conduct industrial espionage. ‘It used to be that
hackers wouldn't do that because we all had a sense of social responsibility ... but now
people do anything for money.’”
The approach used with the Beijing hacker reflects the same methodology the government
employs with human intelligence collectors. China has developed a diverse, informal
network of students, teachers, tourists, and foreign workers inside of host nations to
collect tiny bits of information, and from there develop a composite picture of the
environment.

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Henderson and others have tried to demonstrate that what is true in the realm of human
intelligence-gathering is reflected in Chinese information operations. That is, rather than
assign a targeted goal for collection, the intelligence apparatus tends to rely on sheer
weight of information to develop a global perspective. Experts have hypothesized that this
is exactly the informal association the government and the Red Hacker Alliance share.
The Chinese government appreciates the value of the Chinese computer underground and
has made tentative contacts with them. From the government’s perspective, the hackers
make excellent candidates for mounting information operations against overseas targets.
They have demonstrated that they are creative, highly patriotic. They have the ability to
launch sophisticated attacks, and are motivated to do so.
That is not to suggest that every member of the Red Hacker Alliance has informal
connections with the intelligence bureaucracy. Rather, there are probably very few
members who have any dealings with the government. But this relationship is not
straightforward or simple. At times, it must be uneasy and require a delicate balance of
constraints and freedoms.
A more detailed understanding of how the parties interact, especially where mutual
interests converge, will enable us to uncover the complex cost-benefit analysis that the
government must calculate when it allows the Red Hacker Alliance to operate within its
borders. From the government’s perspective, the Chinese computer underground must
bring benefits that outweigh their liabilities. Otherwise, the Red Hacker Alliance’s activities
would be halted.
There are very few indications that the government is now making any efforts to shut
down the Red Hacker Alliance, surely a telling sign that the cost-benefit analysis is in the
underground’s favor. So, if this is not a state-sponsored organization, what are the factors
that make it worth the government’s while to allow the alliance to operate?
The most obvious reason for the government’s tolerance of the Red Hacker Alliance is that
it is likely that it receives valuable information. Thousands of attacks per day could surely
fill in some of the gray areas of a composite intelligence picture. Furthermore, as a nonstate
actor, the Red Hacker Alliance provides Beijing with plausible deniability. Even if
freelance hackers could be positively identified, their actions are easily disavowed as those
actions of patriotic youth, and certainly not of the government.
In addition to intelligence collection, and the distinct possibility that the government and
the alliance have financial ties, nationalist politics also bind the computer underground and
the government together.
The political sphere can be divided into two distinct categories, domestic and international.
Domestic political hacking targets dissidents and separatist social movements found inside
China - and extends to overseas supporters. The targets of these attacks are groups that
are perceived to challenge the “unity of the motherland,” or question the legitimacy of the
Communist Party, such as Falun Gong, the Tibet movement, and democracy activists and
dissident networks such as Human Rights in China. Since at least 2002, dissident groups

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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operating outside of China have claimed that they have experienced targeted malware
attacks such as the ones we considered earlier. It has also been noted that such attacks
have coincided with calls by officials from the Ministry of Public Security for more
aggressive measures against hostile “foreign forces subverting China via the Internet.”
When we consider the international sphere, we see that Beijing has been able to turn to
the Red Hacker Alliance as a proxy force as well as a rallying force for Chinese solidarity.
Any historical account of the computer underground in China shows an organization that
aggressively supports government policy through sophisticated online operations. Positive
public perception of the alliance’s nationalistic posturing also offers some degree of
protection and support from the central government. The Chinese public tends to see
hackers as a voice of the people, capable of reaching across great distances to right the
wrongs done to China by her enemies. In certain circles, famous hackers are revered as
Hollywood stars might be, and not as criminals.
Let us now consider evidence that the central government is engaged in tentative efforts
to recruit members of the computer underground. Evidence drawn from Chinese Internet
forums and news broadcasts clearly demonstrates that members of the Red Hacker
Alliance would like to be a state-sponsored entity, and are rather offended not to be.
In August 2005, Phoenix television news carried a report that Chinese hackers wanted to
be recruited by the government to form Internet security battalions to safeguard the
security of domestic networks. Posts on the Honker Union 2 of China’s bulletin board
system were in agreement:
“We need to move toward standardized honker unions. We can't wait until the nation has
a crisis to act; we must be prepared to do something meaningful for the motherland. Why
can't we become a government-approved network technology security unit?”
According to other postings, various members of the organization had learned of foreign
countries establishing “hacker network security units” and felt that China should do the
same. On the government side, we can see something similar - some authorities
expressing interest in recruiting or learning from members of the Red Hacker Alliance.
Following the Sino-American cyber-conflict of 2001, ignited by the mid-air collision of a US
reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter aircraft, the renowned Chinese military
expert, Prof. Zhang Zhao Zhong, expounded on the vital significance of the seven-day
network war.
He suggested that these real-life experiences in network warfare should be officially
researched for the benefit of the country. As the director of the National Defense
University’s Military Science and Technology and Equipment Research Department, Zhang
pointed out that during the the cyber-conflict, Chinese hackers had developed many new
tactics and gained much experience.
The weakness of security on government servers may be a possible explanation for the
cyber-espionage charges leveled at China. Non-state hackers inside China, and hackers

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outside the country compromising these systems could account for a significant
percentage of attacks emanating from Chinese government networks. It is highly doubtful
that the People’s Liberation Army, for example, would launch attacks from accounts so
easily identified. However, civilian hackers could find these compromised machines
excellent launching pads for attacks.
Finally, a further blurring of the lines between civilian and government activities is the way
the government will tend to co-opt public facilities and draft them into military service. In
2003, Dongshan District of Guangzhou, one of the major science and technology centers
in the southern region, spent $54,000 to turn the provincial telecommunications company,
data communications bureau, microwave communications bureau, and Southern Satellite
Telecommunications Services Corporation into a militia information warfare battalion.
While these public facilities were becoming an official unit in the militia battalion, others
such as NetEase Guangdong and the China Unicom Paging Company in Guangzhou were
being brought on board, even though they did not have an established mission.
The Guangdong area has been cited as one of the major areas for “governmentsponsored”
hacking, and the activities of groups such as these may be adding to the
confusion of what is State organized and what is civilian.
I hope that this brief overview of the technology behind these targeted malware attacks,
and consideration of who might be responsible for them has proved interesting and
informative - particularly to those whose organizations have been recently attacked.
Journalists traveling to Beijing in August need to be aware of the dangers online in China.
Media organizations have been very recently targeted by Chinese hackers - both through
stealthy cyber-espionage, and less subtle denial of service attacks on CNN, for example.
Also, you may wish to report on these issues. If, in the future, you find your organization
has been attacked in the ways I have outlined here, please, don’t hesitate to get in touch:
jamyang@08310.org
My thanks to Mikko H. Hypponen, Maarten Van Horenbeeck and Scott Henderson.

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Panel 5
China's Internet:
What freedom? What limits?
moderator: Richard Winfield
Chairman, World Press Freedom Committee
Learning to probe across the Great Firewall
Ronald J. Deibert
Director, the Citizen Lab, Munk Center for International Studies,
University of Toronto; co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative
I am a political scientist but I employ computer programmers and engineers to work on
projects under my direction in the area of the Internet and human rights. These include
the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative project to document patterns of Internet censorship
and surveillance worldwide, and Psiphon, a development project and software tool that
helps people get around Internet censorship.
Let me begin with the OpenNet. It is a very large collaborative project at the center of
which are four universities - Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Toronto - each of which fills
a certain functional role. People have described it as something akin to a civil society
global intelligence organization.
It combines contextual research of a traditional sort, meaning that we have experts who
understand countries under observation, who live in the countries and who help us target
the technical testing that we do. They analyze the results and write up the reports. We
could not undertake the research without these local experts, who provide the contextual
meaning. They also take the greatest risk. In some countries our research is considered
espionage. Running the software tests is critical but also very risky.
I said there are four universities at the core of the OpenNet Initiative. In fact, there are
probably about 100 researchers in total. We have just launched a new branch of the
OpenNet Initiative called ONI Asia, which includes about 15 non-government organizations
throughout Asia. So this is a very large operation.
Let me take a moment to explain how it works. We use a spectrum, starting with remote
probes, which is where we connect with computers that allow us to use them as proxies in
countries under investigation. From these, we make requests for web sites as though we
were in the country.
We also rely on people living and traveling in the country. They download software onto
their laptops and a series of tests are run over an extended period of time. We also have

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what we call black box computers that are set up in countries around the world that we
control ourselves through a secure shell account, allowing us to test 24/7.
The software connects back to databases in Toronto and Cambridge in which we have put
together thousands of urls (Internet addresses) and key words. There are two main
baskets of data, the global list and the local list. The global list includes urls on everything
from civil rights to pornography. We run it in every country that we test in, and then we
also run a local list which varies from country to country. These lists are put together by
locals who understand the context and these consist of web sites, key words and urls,
usually in the local languages, that the experts expect will be targeted for filtering in the
country under investigation. Again, local experts are very important to this research. More
than 20 languages are used in the construction of the local language tests, and we are
presently running tests as we speak in 71 countries around the world.
We have been investigating China for several years. We have produced a major report in
2004 2005, updated 2006-7. We intend to continue to do this throughout the period
leading up to and after the Olympics, so that we can gauge exactly what is being filtered.
We categorize China as the world's most active filterer of Internet content. It employs
technical, legal and social means to try to control access. We found that filtering is
centralized in China. No matter where you connect from, at some point you meet the
filters at the main international gateways at the backbone of the network, and the
filtering that takes place there is remarkably consistent. There are basically three methods
that are used.
The first interferes with the system that cross-references domain names, such as www.
example.com with the numerical address. When you try to access a filtered web site the
translation to the numerical address gets redirected to a non-existent site so it looks to all
intents and purposes from the user's perspective as if something is wrong with the site or
it doesn't exist.
China also employs Internet protocol blocking, which affects the way the actual numbers
are programmed into the routers, and key word filtering in the urls. There are rumors also
of scanning for key words in the body of the text. As far as we know, that has not yet
happened, but the way we are testing now will enable us to find out. Technical filtering is
combined with extensive legal mechanisms - laws that prescribe and restrain what can be
done on line. Most of these have the intent of devolving responsibility down to the user
level, whether that is the actual user or the Internet service provider.
The Western search engines that operate in China, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo,
try to be accommodating to the Internet censorship regime by de-indexing search results,
removing results from queries. The Internet telephony service Skype uses a similar
filtering system on its chat service.
Lastly, there are social controls. Self-discipline pacts, where telecommunications operators
agree that they will cooperate with the regime, are an extension of the climate of self-

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censorship. Together, these technical, legal and social means are the mechanisms that are
used to create a matrix of controls in China.
It is a contractual point with the International Olympic Committee that journalists must
have free access to the Internet, but the big question is how will this happen?
One way that has already begun is through an easing of restrictions. There have been
some sites that have been perennially blocked in China that are being slowly unblocked,
and it interesting to note that these are mostly English-language web sites. The BBC for
example was recently unblocked in China. Local language and local issues will still be
filtered but, of course, foreign journalists going to China tend not to look at those sites.
There is also talk of assigning blocks of Internet protocol addresses to foreign journalists.
That is certainly possible but, it is difficult to manage because you must control the access
points, such as hotel rooms. A similar system was set up in Tunisia at the World Summit
on the Information Society, where part of the convention had free Internet access and
another building in the convention did not. So something like that is certainly possible, but
it would be very difficult to enforce, and I am sure that foreign journalists traveling to
China if they knew what to look for would bump up against Internet filtering.
Let me turn now to getting around Internet censorship. There are many ways. For
example, one very simple method to avoid key word filtering is to enter the numerical
address of the site that is blocked.
One method the Chinese use is to connect to proxy servers based outside of the country.
The most common way is to find a server set up in open public forums. But that ends up
on the block list and you have to find a new proxy. Of course, it is a very insecure way of
getting around Internet censorship because you don't know who is setting up the proxy,
and a lot of the proxies are in plain text, meaning that the content is easy to intercept. On
top of that, it is not easy to set up a proxy computer for someone who is not technical.
The Psiphon project aims to get over these weaknesses and shortcomings. The more you
understand how Internet filtering systems work, the better you understand how to get
around them. What we wanted to do was to create a method whose main innovation is
not so much technological as social. Psiphon is a tool used within private social networks
of trust. Instead of advertising connections to a proxy you set it up privately and you give
the connection information only to a few friends, trusted family members or people within
your organization.
To make Psiphon easy to use, we bundle all the different steps that are required to set up
a server on a home computer into one small application that anyone can download. It was
released in December 2006 as a free, open source tool. About 150,000 downloads have
been made since then. There is nothing to download or instal from the user side.
We are working on a new web-based version of Psiphon that is distinct from the original in
that it is entirely web-based, with no need to download and instal. The Psiphon service will
operate thousands of connection nodes which we will assign to groups and organizations.

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We have slowly been rolling this out and testing it and have been working with a number
of human rights organizations, for example all of those involved in Tibet. It will extend
even further the ease of use and enable many more people to operate nodes. In fact,
even a person in a censored country could set up and operate a node and give
connectivity to friends and family members.
We also produce a guide to bypassing Internet censorship, which may be handy for
anyone traveling to China. It is translated into various languages and available free on the
citizen lab web site, www.citizenlab.com.
Have there been cases of false proxy sites? We have certainly heard rumors. In Iran, we
found out about a service the American government was operating through VOA in
cooperation with a company called Anonymizer. They were setting up proxy services
outside of Iran, and broadcasting in the connection information inviting citizens to connect
to the proxies.
Our researchers in Iran connected to the servers and did some tests. We found out two
things. One was that the service was entirely in plain text, meaning it was not encrypted.
The very people whom the authorities wanted to track were being corralled into this
system that was being announced over radio and that the authorities were presumably
listening to as well.
The other thing we found is less serious. We found there were porn filters on the proxy
servers themselves. It didn't make sense to us. It turned out that, because it was paid for
by US taxpayer dollars, the people behind it said they couldn't justify Iranians surfing for
porn. So they put in crude porn filters that actually ended up blocking innocent sites.
Chinese Citizen journalists:
blogging for democracy
Watson Meng
Founding Editor, Boxun News web site
I will briefly introduce Boxun News and I will tell you what is the impact of the Internet in
China and give you a few live examples of the people who have got into trouble because
they reported for Boxun.
Boxun was founded in 2000 and was blocked two months after its launch. Boxun News
now updates 24/7 and is very active. We have more than 2,000 blogs. If you compare
that to the number of blogs in China - about 90 million, I think - the number is not so
huge. But we are different. I think most of the blogs that we host can only exist in China.
We are supported by citizen journalists, very similar to OhmyNews.com (a South Korean
news web site) and NowPublic.com (a Vancouver-based collaborative site). We have no
funding, but because of this model we can operate without many resources.

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I mentioned citizen journalists. YouTube.com is a form of citizen journalism. It is operated
by user-generated content with very huge impact and without much input from the
company. In China, many things happen without journalists being on the scene. They
cannot be there during a protest or police violence, even if they know something has
happened. So in this situation, the citizen journalist steps in and reports through Boxun or
through blogs
With Internet technology, China's control on the media has been broken. China literally
cannot control the information anymore because it is so easy to receive and share
information through the Internet. With such a number of blogs inside China, some 90
million, a lot of discussion goes on. There is Internet censorship in China, but still the
information comes out after a few days.
NGOs like Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists can use the
information from the Internet as a resource to affect policy makers. So we can observe
that what we do affects policy-making in China and outside, too. Two weeks ago, when I
went to [Washington] DC to get a visa to attend this conference, I met people at the
Congress who told me that they watch Internet daily for what happens in China.
We know the firewall exists. It means China does not have the Internet, it has an Intranet.
Web sites outside China like us receive attacks, literally on a daily basis. Sometimes these
are very serious. Last year, a two-month denial of service attack meant our web site could
not be accessed by users for a long period of time. In December, our blogs were broken
into and all the contents were deleted. And this month, our video web site was broken
into and some user information was changed. Also, viruses have been targeted against
dissidents. We had the experience at this conference. They put a spy in the user's
computer. In China at all the Internet cafés, the business owners must install spy software
on each PC at their own expense.
So why does the Chinese government want to do this spying and seek information from
companies like Yahoo? Because they want to know who did what and then punish some
people. Many people have gotten into trouble. If you read accounts about jailed reporters
and Internet users, a number of them relate to Boxun. Let me give a few examples.
First, Huiang Jinqiu. He published about 500 articles before he was arrested. In September
2003 he was arrested and the next year he got a 12-year sentence.
You may also know about Li Changqing. He was a former deputy director of Fu Zhou daily.
He reported about dengue fever through Boxun in October 2004. He lost his freedom in
December 2004 and received a three-year sentence. He is the winner of this year's
Golden Pen of Freedom award. He was released in February. He is doing fine now.
The next is Sun Lin and his wife He Fang. They both started to report for Boxun in late
October 2006. The difference is that they used a video. They acted in a very public way,
almost on a daily basis for a period. He had a business card with his contact details. He

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got a lot of calls saying “come here we have something happening.” In March, a guy was
interviewing the people around while the guy was on the ground unconscious.
The police went to his home and he taped the process. The police asked him to stop
working for us. So after that he said “Okay, I'm no longer a journalist for Boxun, but I am
a citizen of China.” And he put that on his card, with Boxun's e-mail address.
Currently, he is still in jail without trial. It is a very difficult time for their families. He
comes from a Communist family with a very good position in China, but they chose to
work for freedom.
Then, there is Hu Jia, who was also jailed. He posted to a different web site, but they said
he worked for Boxun.
So we have those brave people and good lawyers to defend them, who are also
volunteers, but we have no money. International attention is very important. The
Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders have done great work to
help them. I hope they will continue to support them.
Going on the Internet offensive:
China moves from defensiveness
Julien Pain
Director, France 24 TV’s “Observers” news web site
China is the world champion for Internet censorship. They are the very best at censoring
foreign Internet sites and search engines like Google. It is an extremely effective system.
We saw it in action in the Tibet crisis, and it worked very well. Not only were the Chinese
not informed about Tibet, but if you went on discussion forums all you found were
messages against the Tibetans.
One might have thought that 1.3 billion Chinese people were against Tibet. The fact is
that comments with other opinions were not posted on the forums. In China, citizens are
just not informed. What people do not realize is the impact this censorship has on
Western media.
I work for a television channel and we need pictures, we need images. If we have no
images there is no news. In the Tibet crisis, the very first picture we got came out 24
hours after the start of the riots. Twenty-four hours may not sound like a lot, but even
from Burma we got the images just two hours after the fact.
So not only does China have technical resources that prevent an exchange of information
on the Internet, but also by scaring the public, by preventing tourists from taking pictures,

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by keeping them in their hotel rooms, the authorities were successful in preventing us
from seeing what was going on.
We knew that about 100 people had been killed. The problem was there was no proof,
and where there is no proof, as a journalist you can't really talk about it. Your information
doesn't carry much weight. But thanks to the Internet and thanks to the network we have
created with people in China who are not professionals, we finally did get access to
images that showed that the army had shot demonstrators with live bullets.
So you might say, in spite of it all, that the Internet does play a positive role in China
because we would not have had these images at all without it. Despite the automatic
filters, which do exist, no doubt about it, we still managed to get pictures and information
and news from China.
From my point of view - and I have worked on censorship a great deal - what was most
interesting about the Tibetan crisis was not so much the censorship but what happened
after the events. I'm talking about the huge wave of propaganda on the Internet in the
past few weeks and especially surrounding the incidents around the Olympic torch in Paris
and London.
As a journalist in charge of that web site, I was amazed. Ours is a brand new web site,
and we usually get five or six comments about any news item. But for each article on
Tibet or about the Olympic torch, I was all of sudden getting 50 comments, and they all
came from Chinese people. There were more Chinese comments on Tibet than comments
from Europeans or Americans, which is astonishing because most of the site's users are
Westerners. And many of these comments were in very good French or English.
I was really surprised. How was it that Chinese people had learned French overnight and
were capable of writing comments in excellent French, even with all the correct accents?
I wonder - and I don't have the answer - where all these comments were coming from?
Are we talking about Chinese people living in France who speak French quite well and who
had a sudden outburst of nationalism because of the news. Or are they Chinese people in
China? And, if so, how many people in China speak French that well? If they had invested
so much time in studying French, why were they all of a sudden insulting France? Is it
possible that some of these Internet users were paid by Beijing to launch a propaganda or
public relations campaign to defend China?
What we see is that China has decided to change its attitude. Usually, censorship is an
admission of weakness. It is an admission that the news from abroad can really disrupt
your country. It can change public opinion and trigger in-depth change. Well, now it
seems as if a different phase has begun. China is trying to export its ideas -- and not just
on Chinese forums. It is exporting its ideology to foreign web sites like France 24
“Observer.”
The Tibet crisis showed that China has no hesitation over using the Internet. It uses the
Internet to convey its own propaganda. The boycott in China of [the French-owned

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supermarket chain] Carrefour, for example started on the Internet. And Carrefour is
terrified of this.
So we have to see that China has become much more proactive. They are much less
frightened of the news coming into their country, and they are prepared to fight it out on
our web sites. I think this is something that is developing even as we speak.
On our web site, there were so many comments from China giving the Chinese viewpoint
that one got the impression that they had won the argument. There were all sorts of
people saying that the Dalai Lama was an impostor. They had much more detailed
information on Tibet than our French readers. I think this is going to be a challenge over
the next few years. It is an export program of China's views and ideology in a new
proactive mode, with the Internet as its vehicle. This, in my opinion, is much more
worrisome than censorship.
Maintaining political correctness
at the Internet cafes
Yu Zhang
Coordinator, Independent Chinese PEN Center
China joined the global Internet in 1994. Internet access became commercially available in
1995. In 1996, China had fewer than 100,000 Internet users and 1,000 web sites. Eleven
years later, by the end of 2007, this had increased to 210 million users and 1.5 million
web sites.
This remarkable development has certainly improved the quality of people's lives,
including their freedom of expression, at least technically. Independent writers, especially
cyber-dissidents, who had little chance to get their critical opinions publicized on
traditional media, can more easily find opportunities to publish through the Internet while
generally facing less troubles than their predecessors who had fought for their free
expression for years. In today's China, Internet expression has become extensively
popular and extremely important to the intellectuals, particularly the dissidents.
On the other hand, China has never abandoned police control and censorship of Internet
expression. In 1996, branches of the newly formed Special Police for Internet Security
Inspection were established in several large cities where Internet access was available. In
1998, the Ministry of Public Security established a Public Information Network Security
Inspection Bureau, which covers the entire country.
The Internet police include more than 50,000 officers, each responsible for 4,000 Internet
users on average. They have set up several hundred web sites or home pages. In more
than 150 cities, they patrol web sites and forums to remind users to behave themselves
and censor on-line expression and information.

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China has been world's largest jailer of writers and journalists. Since 2004, the
Independent Chinese PEN Center has documented about 80 cases, excluding those in
Tibet, and those detained for less than a month or released before 2004. 39 are still in jail.
There were no convictions for Internet expression in China before Dec 28, 2000, when the
Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Standing Committee adopted the
Resolution on Internet Safety, which establishes as a crime:
• Using the Internet for rumor-mongering, defamation or publicizing or transmitting
any other harmful information to incite subversion of the State power, repudiate
the socialist system...
• Stealing or divulging state secrets, intelligence or military matters through the
Internet.
Since then, 28 persons have been jailed for periods of up to 10 years for subverting state
power over the Internet, including Li Yuanlong, a journalist who was sentenced to two
years in prison in 2005 for writing an essay entitled “Joining American citizenship in mind.”
Ma Yalian served 18 months of “education through labor” for posting her personal
account of how police had harassed her and other dissidents.
Li Changqing, the winner of the World Association of Newspaper's Golden Pen of Freedom
award, recently completed a three-year sentence for “spreading false and terror
information” by reporting on an outbreak of dengue fever for the Boxun news site.
Shi Tao, a recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2005 Press Freedom award
and WAN's 2005 Golden Pen of Freedom award, has been serving a 10-year sentence
since 2004 for “illegally providing state secrets overseas” for e-mailing notes about a
Communist Party document on media guidelines.
Huang Jinqiu was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced by 22 months) in 2003 for
publishing critical articles and organizing a political party on the Internet.
Government censorship and suppression on Internet activities in China has been getting
more effective and severe with the development of information technology, especially with
increasing assistance and cooperation from the world's leading IT giants such as Yahoo,
Google, Microsoft and Cisco.
The arrest and conviction of some dissidents have been based on evidence provided by
Internet companies such as Yahoo, which provided information that resulted in the
conviction of at least four dissident writers - Wang Xiaonin (10 years), Li Zhi (8 years),
Jiang Lijun (4 years) and Shi Tao (10 years).
A security information management and surveillance network called Golden Shield is a
comprehensive national project developed by the Public Security Ministry since 1998. It
makes it hard to publish dissident opinions and sensitive news in China. Web masters
quickly delete suspect items, or risk the close of web sites or forums

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Since 2006, no independent forum or web site dealing with political or social issues has
been able to survive in China. Information from overseas is censored by the so-called
Great Firewall of China, using a variety of filtering and deception methods at the country's
limited Internet gateways.
The most noticeable appearance of the Internet police is at the Internet cafés, where
more than a third of users now carry out their main on-line activities. Since 2003,
however, more and more local authorities have ordered the Internet cafés to demand that
all customers register with their real identities.
In 2004, nearly half of China's 200,000 Internet cafés were restricted or closed by the
police for various reasons, while the rest had to instal surveillance software and keep
records of the names and addresses of all users. They also had to help the police to
perform the remote central monitoring and control of all Internet activities.
More and more cyber-dissidents can be identified by the Internet police at an early stage,
as soon as they post their first critical online message is posted, and so are warned and
harassed before their Internet expressions reach the level of an arrest or conviction.
Undoubtedly, this has resulted in self-censorship.
So, freedom of speech on the Internet has been effectively suppressed, although arrests
and convictions for alleged cyber-offenses have declined since 2003/2004.
Discussion:
Legal hot-line for journalists
The World Press Freedom Committee is spearheading planning for a hot-line for journalists
arrested or detained in China. According to WPFC Chairman Richard Winfield, “We’re
getting a broad group of organizations to work out a system whereby legal counsel will be
available for those journalists who run into a legal emergency in China.” The following
summarizes discussion on the issue.
Richard Winfield
We have begun organizing a coalition of NGOs and news organizations to work out a
system whereby legal counsel will be available for those who run into a legal emergency.
Four years ago in New York City, where I am from, there was a Republican National
Convention where there were wide-scale protests. Among the thousands rounded up by
the police were eight journalists. They spent up to 24 hours in detention. We got lawyers
for them and none of them was charged.
This effort has been going on since 1972. Media defense lawyers working pro bono
consult with the police in advance and then, if a journalist is arrested, go to the police
station, go to the courthouse, go to the jail to win release of the journalist. That is the

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model we hope to apply in Beijing. It will not be an easy time to arrange to select a group
of Chinese lawyers This is undoubtedly a politically sensitive matter and government
approval may be needed. These lawyers will encounter unquestionably more than the
usual amount of harassment and intimidation.
I said that eight journalists were arrested four years ago in New York, out of 2,000
journalists who visited. If you extrapolate that for 30,000 journalists in Beijing over two
weeks, that means 240 journalists could be arrested there.
Agnès Gaudu
I can imagine that foreign journalists going to Beijing might get into trouble, but that is
not what I am afraid of or the most concerned with. It is more appropriate to ask about
funding lawyers for Chinese journalists, who are in very much bigger danger. I ask the
editors here and all the organizations here concerned with press freedom and freedom of
expression, are you actually organizing some kind of solidarity with Chinese colleagues?
Jocelyn Ford
Of course, foreign correspondents are most concerned about our sources, and I don't
know if there is any possible legal representation that could be provided if journalists were
to find that sources were detained after speaking to them. As for foreign correspondents,
if we are detained, they will release us. We are not in that great danger, and it is unusual
that we would need a lawyer on the spot. You try to talk your way out of the situation.
You call the ministry, you call your embassy.
Jean-Philippe Béja
As resources usually are limited I think we should concentrate on what is useful. The
worst that can happen to a foreign journalist is to be expelled from the country. You never
see a foreign journalist being arrested and charged. The only ones who can be are foreign
journalists of Chinese descent. What I think is, if you have means, if you have resources,
you should lecture journalists about the use of sources and about how you can endanger
people when you interview them, sometimes before a camera. I think this is the most
important thing. You won't need lawyers for foreign journalists, you will need lawyers for
people who might get into trouble because they gave information, because they gave an
interview to a foreign journalist. And also for the fixers, because as we know, the 30,000
journalists when they get to China will need to have helpers. They will hire Chinese
people, students or whatever, and maybe these students won’t be aware of the risks they
take. What I think you should do as organizations for press freedom is to educate foreign
journalists. This I think is basic and much more important.
Sharon Hom
I think it’s the Chinese domestic journalists who are going to be at the greatest risk. Most
of the correspondents will be able to handle themselves. One thing we should point out is
that with the new identification system at the border everyone will have biometric face
recognition data stored on a central server. In addition, more than 30,000 cameras have
been installed for biometric recognition in the subways, in the public spaces and in all the
Olympic venues. I think people need to be very aware of whether there is a camera when
they do interviews. We are trying to map where the cameras are, so we are going to be

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asking everyone, if you see one, snap it on your cell phone and send the location to us.
Secondly, there is a group in Hong Kong that is trying to support lawyers. In the United
States we are backing American lawyers and judges who will try to support Chinese
lawyers. They are the ones who are going to be needed to defend Chinese journalists and
they will also be targeted.
Panel 6
How does China deal with foreign
and peripheral news media ?
moderator, Vincent Brossel
Head, Asia Desk, Reporters Without Borders
Voice of Tibet: struggling to be heard
Oystein Alme
Director, Foundation Voice of Tibet
We are an independent NGO registered in Norway, to “produce and transmit unbiased
news and information to Tibet and China in Tibetan and Mandarin languages - through
short-wave radio transmissions, satellite transmissions and Internet.”
Voice of Tibet is the only station outside China with daily programs about Tibet in
Mandarin.
I would like to tell you my experiences of nearly 13 years of broadcasting into Tibet and
China, but first I want to comment on the events in Tibet since March 10.
To me, it was a big surprise that after a few days of protests in Lhasa the police and
security forces seemingly vanished on March 14. The next morning, the Chinese
authorities spread footage from the previous day’s riots in Lhasa worldwide and at home.
Normally, portraying the vulnerability and weakness of the authorities in this way would
never have been an option. But the riot images were accompanied by the message that
the Tibetans are criminals, looters and even terrorists, and that the Dalai Lama is the
mastermind behind it all.
To me, it seems that the Chinese authorities took the opportunity to portray the Tibetans
that way, just as after 9/11 they smeared Uighur activists in Xinjiang with the terrorist
label. Knowing that demonstrations are not allowed to be reported in China, the fact that
the policy can change to portray the Tibetans as terrorists masterminded by the Dalai
Lama is alarming. Later, the official media said Tibetans were planning suicide bomb
attacks during the Beijing Olympics.

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It seems as though the “strike hard” and “re-education” campaigns in Tibet following the
expulsion from the territory of tourists and international media is a way of stepping up
assimilation policies that have been threatening Tibetan culture and identity for centuries.
In this perspective, it is important to credit the Tibetans for not targeting the Chinese
people with their protests and demonstrations, but instead directing their anger at the
Chinese political leadership. The monks who broke free to reach the international press on
a guided tour to Labrang on April shouted, “We want human rights” and “We have no
rights” and many said, “We are not against the Beijing Olympics, we are for the Beijing
Olympics.” Of course, these statements will never reach the Chinese public, at least not
through the domestic media.
Art. 35 in the Chinese Constitution reads: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy
freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of
demonstration.” I have not much to add to this, except to question why these rights are
not respected.
For the more than 12 years that Voice of Tibet has been on the air, our transmissions
have been targeted by systematic jamming by China. For years, we have protested these
violations. But the International Telecommunication Union, a global institution under the
UN umbrella that is responsible for regulating and overseeing international broadcasting
law, tells us they are aware of the problem and that we have their moral support, but they
can do nothing. They say, “It is a waste of time coming to us.”
In the late 1990s, the Chinese authorities began understanding the popularity and impact
of foreign short-wave radio broadcasts into Tibet. They responded in 2000 with what is
called the XiXing project. Since then, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in
improving their own ability to broadcast their own programs and to jam or block access to
foreign broadcasts.
There are two ways of blocking access to short-wave radio broadcasts, and our
transmissions are targeted by both:
• Jamming on top of Voice of Tibet’s registered frequencies, using high power
transmitters outside the cities of Xian, Beijing, Kashi and Nanning. Most of the
time, transmissions from two different locations target each and every Voice of
Tibet transmission.
• Local or “ground-wave” jamming using small transmitters in or outside more than
100 cities and townships in Tibetan areas. These local jammers are very effective,
but have a limited reach of about 20 kilometers in radius, depending on the
topography of the area.
The jamming transmissions do not stop at the border. The signals, containing a mix of
dragon dance music, drums and noise, badly affect listening in India, Nepal and all the
way to Europe.

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The French company Thales (Thomson) has sold and installed a lot of the equipment used
for jamming. It is known that Chinese manufacturers have copied the foreign equipment
and are now exporting it to other countries, including Zimbabwe.
The Chinese Embassy in Oslo has told us: “it is our right to block access to your
transmissions. You are hostile to China and you are the Dalai Lama’s radio station and
your objective is to split Tibet from China.”
Former President Jiang Zemin stated in 2002 when inspecting the XiXing project:
“Unremitting efforts should be made in the radio and television broadcasting coverage in
the western region and achievements should be consolidated, so that the voice of the
Party and the State can be transmitted further to millions of households and the voice of
China can be transmitted all over the world.”
In Tibet, it is illegal to listen to foreign broadcasts like ours.
The Voice of Tibet also transmits its programs by satellite, targeting private reception dish
owners in China, including Tibetan areas outside the Tibetan Autonomous Regions.
We have a round-the-clock service, although not through the best satellite option. In
2006, Chinese authorities threatened the up-link stations and satellite company owners
with severe consequences if they did not eliminate the Voice of Tibet. One of the
companies kept $2,000 in prepaid costs “for all the harassment and threats that have
come our way due to Voice of Tibet.”
Those with enough technical skill can access foreign radio stations through proxy servers.
But in filtering foreign web sites, the Chinese sometimes cut entire sections of the Internet
to block our web casts. Recently, the Swedish Tibet Committee experienced pressure from
Swedish companies to find another server, as they also had been blocked in China
because of filtering of www.tibet.se. Seemingly, nobody protested to the Chinese
authorities.
Documenting jamming violations is no problem. Sound clips recorded inside China from
our transmissions are available on the Internet daily. Still, it has been a struggle to get the
issue of Chinese jamming violations on the agenda and to get international support.
Governments have in many respects established a separate standard for China compared
with other countries. “What did you expect? This is China,” I am often told.
The Beijing Olympics is a historic opportunity to reach out to the Chinese peopl, and to
expose how the Communist Party manipulates reality by misusing its information and
media monopoly. The Olympics could also be a good opportunity to address the issue of
jamming violations.

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Jammed news competes for Chinese ears
Libby Liu
President, Radio Free Asia
We are funded by the US Congress through a grant from the Broadcasting Board of
Governors to do surrogate broadcasting, which means we try to behave as indigenous free
press in countries that have a closed press - Cambodia, Laos, Burma, North Korea,
Vietnam and China, where we broadcast in Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan and Uighur.
We do exactly what these regimes hate the most, which is to try to get local and national
news to the people that it is happening to. Oftentimes, I have representatives from the
Chinese government say to me, “You should do more good news. Our economy is so great
and there are so many uplifting pieces.” I say, “Listen, we don't choose our news. You
choose our news. Our job is to put on the news that the central news will not put on.”
And in the cases where they do put on what we would say are confusing accounts, we will
try to correct the record by giving contrary witness reports. We are also trying to fill a void
by providing a platform for the open discussion of forbidden issues and topics. And you
know, it cannot be expressed more strongly how people feel, when they cannot talk about
their deepest thoughts on freedom, when they turn on the radio and, as if by a miracle,
they hear somebody on the other side of the country say exactly what they think and feel.
This is an incredible thing we are able to do and accomplish. Understand that we are
journalists not activists. So we provide facts, reports, witness statements, and we rely on
our audiences to form their own opinion.
For 11 years, Radio Free Asia has been doing this in China. We have created a wide
network of brave sources. They take enormous risks to come to us and tell us about what
is going on in China. But the thing they know after 11 years is that if they have a breaking
story on human rights or press freedom, civil unrest, land seizures or corruption, Radio
Free Asia will be there for them. We will investigate their story. We will find independent
confirmation, and we will report the issues. Our job is to shed light on the concerns of
everyday people so that they can be examined.
We work extensively with citizen journalists. We love the work of Boxun, which often picks
up our reports and republishes our broadcasts or news. We have a unique role. We must
be vigilant about our journalistic ethics. In other words, if we can't confirm a story we hold
it. And believe me we hold so many stories we would love to break that we honestly
believe are true. Although we can get real-time images, we need the context because
without the context of accurate reporting, images are subject to manipulation. And that is
something we are always concerned about. Believe me, if we make a mistake the Chinese
government will be all over us.
One of the advantages that Radio Free Asia has is that we work in multiple languages. So
for example, we recently did a story about a demonstration in Xinjiang of women

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protesting a rule on the wearing of head scarves. We needed to get independent
confirmation, so we tapped our Mandarin service which started to make phone calls into
the region and after 60 phone calls found the tiny village that the Uighurs lived in and was
able to find eyewitness reports that confirmed the story. 3
One of the advantages of doing four languages, and while I am on the subject of Uighurs,
yesterday there was some discussion about the Uighur repression which I think we all
agree is among the harshest in China. I don't know if we have an appreciation of how big
this population is. Between the Uighurs and Tibetans it is conservatively 17 million people
and the land covers about a third of the territory of China, or what the Chinese call China.
Their natural resources are being harvested by China and sent to other parts of China.
What is happening I don't think should be characterized as ethnic minority treatment by
China’s government. I think it’s much more significant than that. But I digress.
One of the things I wanted to talk about is the interference with Radio Free Asia. We are
jammed. We think the Chinese government spends at least as much money jamming us
as we spend programming. There are towers built in the last five or six years in Xinjiang
and in Tibet specifically jamming outside entities and their news broadcasts. We do three
Tibetan dialects. One of our unique abilities to harvest sourcing inside the country is that
we speak dialects. You know people trust people that speak their language.
Once we got our dialect programming up on Tibetan broadcasting, China coincidentally
started to do Tibetan dialect broadcasting - unfortunately, at the same times that we do.
We get letters from our listeners, who have to go outside the country to send us mail
because, otherwise, it mysteriously disappears en route. We had one listener who wrote
and said every time she hears a listener read on the air she gets so excited because
somebody managed to get a letter to us.
Another thing, which I don't think is coincidence, is that since March 10 Radio Free Asia
has been attacked as supposedly being part of this Dalai Lama clique that the central
news has been making accusations about. We have even been condemned by the Havana
government, which is shockingly sympathetic to China and which accuses Radio Free Asia
of participating in, basically, activism - which, again, we don't do.
A note on propaganda: The power of propaganda is huge and I think that we
underestimate the Chinese propaganda machine both inside and outside the country. I
had my father to lunch the other day. He was saying the Tibetans should stop
embarrassing our country because we are losing face, and I said, “Daddy, perhaps there
are people who object to the characterization of Tibet as China.” I think that in the
Western world some of the backlash is predicated on a notion that China is appropriately
trying to settle unrest in its country. I think that we should question some of the basic
assumptions that are perpetrated worldwide.
The cyber-attacks? Does anyone think that the government isn't complicit? One of the
primary goals and outcomes of these espionage and cyber-attacks is to break trust in
the community of dissidents, activists, NGO workers and news sources. If they are able to

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create an environment where a person that we interview can't trust that the e-mails or the
phone calls come from Radio Free Asia, what does that do to our ability to communicate
the news effectively? I can't even be sure if I click on an e-mail from someone I know with
an attachment that I know I am going to get, that a RAT [remote administration tool]
hasn't been planted on my system. So what does that do to all of us in our ability to work
together? I think that is something that bears talking out.
On the nationalism aspect, a story that is very big in the US now is this Duke student
Grace Wang, who tried to talk between a Tibetan group and a group of Chinese students.
She is Han Chinese - so am I - but she has been just eviscerated in cyber-space. I’ve seen
e-mails from people who want to burn her alive. You can't imagine that someone could be
so angry. Her parents are on the run in China because people in their village attack them. 4
It's just shocking what kind of fervor this nationalism is getting into and, I agree with the
observation that perhaps it is not all spontaneous. But it does feed into a fear hysteria that
has been planted in the Chinese nationalists for a long, long time and was just waiting
below the surface to rise to a boil. All of it is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Yet,
when people hear accounts of that they can't believe it could have happened.
This hate speech is very similar, but I don't want you to think that the Han Chinese feel
this way. Our listeners call in saying, “Tell the Tibetan people that not all Han hate them.
Tell the Tibetan people that we believe that if they did rise and protest, then the Chinese
government must have done something to warrant it.”
In closing, imagine the power of this propaganda machine. This is a world that has been
created where [Uighur activist and businesswoman] Rebiya Kadir is called a terrorist and
the Dalai Lama is called a liar.
The complexity and the money they have invested in jamming all our peripheral
broadcasts is the most frequent issue for our callers, who also experience blocking of their
phones. They call 50 times and when they get through they say, “Could you help us with
the jamming problem?” We wish we could. The US government does object all the time
about the jamming, but obviously, it is just a coincidence that they broadcast alternate
programming [on the same frequencies] at the same time as us!
They don't want the news to get to their own people in their own language and they don't
want the news to get out to the world. So that's our job.
1 Units of information transferable by repeated action from one mind to another.
2 A group known for hacker activity, mainly from mainland China. Literally, the name means “Red Guest.”
3 Radio Free Asia reported that several hundred Uighurs were taken into custody after demonstrating in
Hotan and a neighboring county in the Xinjiang region on March 23. It said demonstrators were
demanding that authorities not ban head scarves in the predominantly Muslim region and that they stop
torturing Uighurs and release all political prisoners.
4 Duke University undergraduate Grace Wang tried to mediate a heated interchange on campus over
the Tibetan independence movement. She stressed that she doesn't support Tibetan independence;
she just wanted to intervene when she saw a crowd of 400 to 500 people - mostly Chinese citizens –
squaring off against 12 pro-Tibet protesters.

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“Going home”: not an easy assignment
Fan Ho-Tsai
Chairperson, Hong Kong Journalists Association
Since the topic for this panel is about how China deals with foreign and peripheral media
and I am the only speaker from Hong Kong, I will start my part from the perspective of a
humble journalist in Hong Kong to see how we are treated in China.
But first, the moderator asked me to say something about Ching Cheong. He was invited
to this conference but could not make it. We were most delighted that Ching Cheong was
released just before Lunar New Year to reunite with his family. In Hong Kong, he met the
press on Chinese Valentine’s Day. There was no statement from the authorities as to the
details of his parole. But the meaning of a parole is to serve the term outside jail; he could
be put in jail again if the authorities consider his behavior not good enough.
While we were happy for Ching Cheong’s release, two months later, on April 3, Mr Hu Jia
was sentenced to a term of three and a half years for what he wrote and what he said. So
one was in jail and one was out. It seems that the Chinese authorities maintain a constant
number of innocent inmates. Now we are working to seek Hu Jia’s early release. The Hong
Kong Journalists Association issued a statement to express our anger and held a seminar
in Hong Kong.
China has made a lot of progress since it opened up its economic market in 1979, with a
near double- digit increase in its GDP over the past ten years. Politically, there has been
changing of generations, with a younger and more open-minded leadership. But,
obviously, there is room for improvement in the way the officials handle press inquiries
and the restrictions on news coverage.
According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, there are about 700 foreign correspondents in
China. They include journalists from the two special administration regions, Hong Kong
and Macao, and from more than 300 news organizations from 40 countries. The
journalists are mainly stationed in three cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
There are some differences in the procedures for Hong Kong media and foreign media to
enter mainland China. To be politically correct, the press in Hong Kong started to use the
term mainland China instead of China after Hong Kong’s handover in 1997. Foreign
journalists need to apply for a visa from the Chinese Embassy. But since Hong Kong is a
part of China, we go to the mainland with a paper called “permit to go home” - an
interesting name for a credential.
Mainstream media organizations of Hong Kong now have their own correspondents in the
three cities I mentioned. They file important political news back to Hong Kong every day,
and the electronic media do live reporting. Or they dig into in-depth scoops of their own.
But if they want to cover news in other cities, they have to obtain permission from the
central government's liaison office in Hong Kong. Otherwise, officially their news coverage
is considered to be illegal and the reporters could get into big trouble.

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But we all agree that news allows no time to wait for documents. So, practically, if there
are big disasters in China, the news organizations dispatch crews to the scene as soon as
possible, without prior approval from the liaison office, as competition is very tough
among the media. Sometimes, the officials turn a blind eye to the presence of reporters. It
depends very much on the sensitivity of the news.
At this point, the Hong Kong journalists, mostly comprised of ethnic Chinese, should have
more advantages than their foreign counterparts. Because they have the “permit to go
home,” they can more easily mingle with ordinary tourists to reach primary news sources.
But I have been around the industry for more than 20 years and, frankly speaking, I do
not enjoy trips to mainland China, because I always seem to end up getting caught and
completing my assignment in the back of a police vehicle.
I would like to share with you one encounter. In the summer of 1996, I worked for the
radio and I went to the province of Anhui, in the middle part of China, to cover a serious
flood. I went along with a television crew to share the expenses of renting a car.
We visited different districts to see the aftermath of the disaster. Thousands of houses
were destroyed, some people died, and more people were left homeless. We managed to
talk to the victims, and, only on the second day, officials discovered that we were doing
“illegal reporting.”
At first, we were led to a big room where more than 10 officials from various departments
asked us to present our personal identity documents before they preached to us that we
were in breach of the regulations. Hours later, we were held separately to talk to the
officials one on one. Don’t worry; they did not torture me. They only taught me the
guidelines of how to behave like a “responsible journalist,” which was to make application
first and notify the government of our presence.
When I was totally exhausted in the evening, they asked me to hand over all the audio
recordings. I refused, and insisted that the tapes were the property of my company. But
you have to surrender after a whole day’s waiting around, so I cleared off some
recordings in front of them but kept the rest secretly to do a voice-over for my story later.
They also asked me to write a letter of repentance. I insisted I was dispatched to cover
the assignment and I did nothing wrong. I compromised by writing a statement so that I
could be released. They then treated us to a big dinner, which we later found out was a
farewell dinner.
The next morning, their men were at the hotel to make sure that we headed for the
airport to catch the Hong Kong flight. We had no choice because the officials ordered our
driver not to drive us anywhere other than the airport, or he would be in big trouble. They
also spoke to every other driver with a car to hire, so our chances of evasion were slim.
This is a typical experience of a reporter stepping feet on the soil of the motherland
without approval.

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Some of the restrictions have been lifted and some officials are becoming more openminded
in handling the press nowadays. But as we can see from the unrest that erupted
in Tibet in March, the Chinese government is still very distrustful of the press. After two or
three days’ coverage, reporters were placed under escort and ordered out of Lhasa.
We found that act unjustifiable and regrettable. After the foreign press left, only stateowned
media covered the events. It was very difficult to prove the truthfulness and
credibility of official news coverage, or to monitor the situation. Although authorities
invited some foreign media organizations to go back to Lhasa later, the itinerary was set
by officials who accompanied reporters all the way. It only left the impression that the
government was putting on a show.
As the Olympic Games draw near, the government has relaxed the rules on reporting
under regulations introduced on January 1 2007, but these will expire on Oct.17, less than
two months after the completion of the Games.
Under the new rules, accredited journalists are allowed to interview Chinese citizens or
organizations without prior government approval, as long as consent is sought from the
interviewees. Foreign media can also hire local Chinese as their assistants through
authorized agencies. The procedure of bringing equipment into the country is also
simplified.
A massive influx of visitors to China is expected for this spectacular event. I hope that the
Chinese government can seize this opportunity to show the both the modernization and
the opening up of the country.
Beaming to China in Chinese:
upsides and downsides
Yuwen Wu
News & Current Affairs Editor, BBC Chinese Service
I am here to address the issue of how China deals with foreign media, with particular
reference to our experience with the BBC Chinese Service.
It couldn’t be a more appropriate time to discuss this issue now, as both China and
Western media, including the BBC, have been very much in the news following the riots in
Tibet and the Olympic torch relay; there is a strong attack on the Western media’s
reporting of these events in the Chinese official media, which has spread onto forums,
social networking and video-clip web sites.
I will return to this topic at the end of my speech because I think it is important to put
such outbursts in the proper political context. I will first explain through our own
experience how the authorities control or use foreign media, with the hope that we can
reach some understanding about realistic expectations in the coming months.

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I will make the following points in my presentation:
• In China, media is tightly controlled by the authorities, and there are strict
guidelines as to what and what should not be reported; this is to insure that the
masses toe the party line on major issues, have confidence in the government and
are not influenced by foreign media.
• As far as foreign media is concerned, the authorities want to keep as strict control
as possible, and employ many tactics to do so, including jamming and blocking
output, denying visas to journalists, interference and harassment, and intimidating
people who dare talk to Western media.
• Yet, China is also increasingly concerned about how it is portrayed by foreign
media, and has been trying to project a more positive image in the world; foreign
media can also be used in this effort.
• In our dealing with the Chinese authorities, our status as a foreign media
organization that broadcasts and publishes directly in the Chinese language can
work against us or to our advantage, all depending on the wider political climate,
and what China wants to achieve in its cooperation with us.
• In this Olympic year, the government’s preoccupation is to have successful Games
and highlight China’s achievement; some short-term concessions might be given,
but we are yet to see if they represent real changes to press freedom.
Control of domestic media
Since embarking on opening up and reforms three decades ago, China has not only
achieved breathtaking economic successes and improved the living standard of hundred of
millions of people, but it has also loosened up control in many aspects of people’s lives, so
they are much freer to move around, to seek employment of their choosing, and to live a
lifestyle without state interference.
People are much freer to express their opinions, such as on corruption, legal reforms,
environment, social problems etc., but crucially, the authorities still control what can and
what cannot be reported on many issues, and anything perceived to question the
legitimacy of the government or the political system is not tolerated.
For instance, there are many taboo areas about which open public debate is not possible,
such as the 1989 Tiananmen student movement, the legacies of some former leaders, and
political campaigns. On other issues, such as Taiwan and Tibet, foreign policy, and Falun
Gong, the authorities don’t want the masses to stray from the party line, and those who
do so face severe consequences. A popular and liberal magazine, Freezing Point, was
suspended and its editor removed from the post simply because it carried some articles
considered to have crossed the line. Some dissidents have been sentenced to prison terms
for speaking out on political issues.
Control of foreign media
In this context, it is not hard to understand why the authorities want to exercise strict
control over foreign media; it is simply an extension of the control over the domestic
media, as they don’t want the people to know how these issues are debated inside and
outside China.

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This control takes several forms. One is to block foreign web sites and jam their radio
transmissions. The BBC Chinese service, which has been broadcasting since 1941, is
constantly subject to this kind of interference.
Currently, we broadcast four hours a day to China on the short waves, with a mixture of
news and current affairs programs and feature programs on education, British life, sport
and entertainment.
We also have two web sites: bbcchinese.com, which is a news site, and bbcchina.com, which
is an education site.
At the moment, our short wave transmissions are constantly jammed in China, and our
news web site is blocked as well, but the education site (bbcchina.com) is accessible in
China.
Recently, the BBC News site in English has been unblocked, along with some other web
sites (such as Wikipedia).
I want to stress here that this kind of censorship is effective, but never 100 per cent so.
Our loyal and persistent listeners can try to switch to different frequencies to listen to our
programs, and in some parts of China, people can hear us quite clearly.
Regarding our web site bbcchinese.com, many people in China can use other means to get
to us, so the blocking is never entirely effective; I recently asked several well-respected
scholars if they can access our web site, and they tell me very confidently that they can if
they want to.
Nevertheless, it does interfere with people’s normal listening and reading habits, which
means that we can’t reach our audience in as freely as we hope, and our interaction with
our audience is severely restricted.
In January 2005, after the death of the former party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, we had a
phone-in program to talk about his legacy. One young caller told us that if it were not for
the reports he had heard on the BBC after Zhao had died, he wouldn’t have known that
Zhao Ziyang was such an important figure in recent history and did so much for China’s
reform; he learned from school that Zhao was one of those responsible for the troubles
during the 1989 turmoil. In fact, we had broadcast several series about 1989 student
movement and often interviewed about Zhao Ziyang and others, but obviously this young
man had had no access to this information.
Apart from blocking and jamming, we also have to deal with official interventions or
complaints about our programs. From time to time, we get phone calls or letters from the
Chinese officials complaining about our coverage of Falun Gong, Taiwan or East Turkistan
[Xinjiang] separatist movement.
As program makers, we need to go to China and interview people; and we need to apply
for a journalist visa. Sometimes we get it, sometimes not. In the past years, applications
to make a series about Mao Zedong, about Chinese media reforms and about petitioners’
situation were all denied.

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Recently, even some events we routinely covered in the past became problematic. For
instance, for many years, we could send a reporter to cover the Chinese parliament
sessions in March, but in 2007, our visa application was rejected. The reason given to us
was that there was no quota for us. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world cover
the event, but there is no place for one journalist from BBC Chinese Service! Later in
2007, our visa application to cover the 17th Party Congress was also denied. No reason
was given. Two such rejections in one year sets a record in our dealing with the Chinese
authorities, and is quite baffling, given that the government promised more access to
foreign journalists in the run-up to the Olympic Games.
Concern with China’s image
But China can use foreign media when it suits its purpose. In the 1990s, following the
Tiananmen crackdown, China was isolated internationally and concentrated on economic
development, which saw rapid, double digit growth. The so-called “China threat” theory
gained much currency at that time, which in turn aggravated China. Nationalism soared
and books such as “China Can Say No,” and “Behind the Demonization of China” were
very popular amongst Chinese leaders and intellectuals. The country was clearly troubled
by what it perceived as hostility in the Western media but had no effective way of dealing
with this except through old-fashioned slogans and editorials in the official newspapers.
As Beijing was awarded the right to host the Olympic Games in 2001 and finally joined the
World Trade Organization, it realized that the world’s attention would be focused on China
more and more, and it would do the country a lot of good if it is seen to make efforts to
improve its human rights record, relax media controls and gradually move towards
international standards.
China's bid to project a more positive image has a dual purpose - one is to show to the
world that China is making progress in many areas and that its ambitions are peaceful; the
other is to tell the Chinese people that the West is accepting China as an emerging power
and a force for good, thus boosting its standing among the Chinese people.
In March 2005, the BBC had a week-long broadcasting event called China Week, in which
it was given unprecedented access, and even managed to stage its flagship program,
Question Tim,e from Shanghai. For a whole week, there was coverage about China on
BBC radio, TV and online, which was an eye-opener to a lot of British people. Many in the
British media hailed this as a breakthrough.
China certainly capitalized on this. Headlines in the official media read: “Finally BBC
realized the importance of China and came to China,” or “BBC broadcasts Question Time
from Shanghai, we have nothing to hide.” But the reports are quite selective about what
actually went on during the debate, and only positive comments were quoted.
Of course, all these BBC programs were in English. Apart from the invited audience
present at the Question Time debate, when the country's human rights record was
discussed, Chinese people had no way of watching or hearing it.
So, by allowing the BBC to come to China, British people had a good glimpse of the
enormous changes that have taken place, while the government was seen to be openminded
in its dealing with foreign media.

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Being the BBC Chinese Service
Because we broadcast and publish in Chinese, sometimes we are treated more harshly by
the authorities; but other times, we have better opportunities than our English-language
colleagues.
The BBC has a bureau in Beijing, with two British reporters and some Chinese researchers,
but our numerous requests to have a Chinese producer in China have all been rejected.
In 2006, a BBC team went to Guangdong to do some live programs, and in the team there
were two Chinese producers and some producers and reporters from other language
services. Our two producers were closely watched, their blog was read every day and
commented on by the government minders, and when they interviewed local people, they
were closely watched. More than 10 officials were present when our producer went into a
peasant’s home, making it very difficult to conduct a frank interview.
But sometimes being able to communicate directly in Chinese gives us unique
opportunities that our English-speaking colleagues can’t enjoy.
Over the years, we have worked with Chinese broadcasters to organize debates on social
issues - either broadcast or web cast - which are broadcast by us and our local partners.
We have covered AIDS, smoking and health, the environment, traffic problems and even
press freedom.
The fact that these debates can take place at all shows progress in China, but
considerable differences still exist about the way we approach these issues and the
manner of the debate, and we have to be very resilient and flexible to pull it off.
A very interesting example was a debate on Beijing’s preparedness for the Olympic Games
that took place last August. The issues included what the Games would bring to China, to
Beijing and to ordinary Chinese people, and how would the successes be judged.
Our partner this time was Beijing Sport Radio, part of Beijing Radio. They wanted to use a
well-known international brand as a platform to give good publicity to the Games, and we
wanted to hear some frank views. The plan was to present the debate jointly and
broadcast it live, and we invited some high-profile guests to appear as panelists.
When our production team arrived, however, Beijing Radio was deeply embroiled in a
scandal over adulterated dumplings, which brought down the radio's director, and the
atmosphere was noticeably tense. The station wanted to exercise strict control over the
debate, and the plan to broadcast it live was scrapped; a high-ranking official who had
been invited changed his mind about appearing, so we had to frantically search for a
substitute.
Before the debate, when our presenter and their presenter sat down to go over the
questions, we were told that the debate should not touch on certain areas, such as the
budget, medal hopes for China, or if people outside Beijing would benefit from the Games.
In the end, those questions were asked anyway by our presenter in a very skilled way,
and the guests did give their views. The show was web cast live, and the professionalism
and skills of our production team won high praise from the Chinese side.

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Over the years, we have had many experiences like this. It highlights the different
perceptions of media’s role in China and in the West, but it also gives us hope that
cooperation of this kind will gradually narrow the gap.
Olympic year and press freedom
Since the new media measures took effect at the beginning of 2007, several BBC reporters
in China have tried to cover social issues but met with local interference; the Foreign
Correspondents Club of China received 180 reports of interference in 2007 alone.
In March this year, as soon as troubles started in Tibet, all foreign journalists were
expelled from there, making it very difficult to report what was going on since we had to
rely on second-hand and third-hand material. There were cases of wrong picture captions
and wrong footage used in some TV reporting. This caused angry reaction from the official
Chinese media and triggered anti-Western frenzy, not seen perhaps since the bombing of
the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
Afterwards, there was what happened with the demonstrations surrounding the Olympic
torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco. The BBC, Cable News Network and French
media were severely attacked for being biased and anti-Chinese, not helped by some onair
derogatory comments made by some TV presenters. Anti-CNN and anti-BBC video clips
are doing the rounds on the Internet. BBC and CNN journalists in Beijing have received
threatening messages.
The Chinese service has been inundated with angry messages accusing us of being
untruthful and biased. The tone is aggressive and sometimes extremely hostile.
As editor in the Chinese Service, I feel more than ever before the need to report events
fairly, objectively and with balance, which in our case means covering both sides of the
argument on the Tibetan issue and Olympic torch relay. I notice that some pro-China
demonstrations in the world have not been reported in the mainstream media, which
simply feeds into the belief that there is an anti-China agenda in the West.
While the international community continues to press China to keep its promise and make
it easier for foreign journalists to work there and improve press freedom in general, we as
journalists also have a responsibility to remain balanced, objective and fair in our reporting
of China. Any mistakes we make, or ignorance or prejudice we display will be seized upon
by the authorities and further hinder our communication with the Chinese people, which is
the last thing we want to do, because we have no quarrel with them.

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Comment from the audience:
Radio station couldn’t find mysterious code words
Jay Henderson
Director for East Asia & Pacific, Voice of America
The Dalai Lama said, “If you have evidence that we have been providing direction for
what the Tibetans were doing inside Tibet, then prove it. Show me evidence.” And
[Premier] Wen Jiabao gave a press conference and he said, “Here's the evidence.”
Included was an accusation that the Voice of America was being used to send coded
messages into Tibet.
They said that every time we used the word “skirt,” for example, it was a reference to the
Tibetan flag. Every time, we used the word “uncle” it was said allegedly a reference to the
Dalai Lama.
Well, Wen Jiabao needs to know that we searched our scripts for about a month
backwards and didn't find a single use of either of those words. So we really don't know
how credible the rest of the evidence that he put forward might be.
Concluding speech
From the Opium Wars to the Olympics
Jean-Philippe Béja
Senior Research Fellow, CNRS (French National Center
for Scientific Research)/CERI-Sciences-Po (International Studies Center)
I know I'm keeping you from lunch, and spiritual food is okay but material food is also
very useful. As a Marxist, I should say that material food is even more important. To
continue with Marx, I will quote him: “The free press is the ubiquitous, vigilant eye of the
people's soul. It is the spiritual mirror in which the people can see itself and selfexamination
is the first condition of wisdom.” May I remind you that Karl Marx is revered
in the People's Republic of China
So, to sum up these one and a half days of debate ... we had an extensive presentation
on the working conditions of foreign journalists in China and we have also had a
comprehensive presentation of the way censorship is organized in China. There were very
good papers on the way the Central Propaganda Department works, and on the structure
of this department, with its local branches down to the lowest administrative echelons.
And this morning, we also had a lot of information about how the Internet is controlled,
and on how the Chinese leadership is proactive where control of opinion is concerned.

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Of course, the authorities do control the flow of opinion towards China, using all kinds of
censorship mechanisms, but they are also very proactive on Western and foreign web
sites. I think this is a very interesting aspect that many people don't talk about too much.
Richard Winfield asked this morning, why does the Chinese government control the press,
and he recited the parable of the scorpion and the dog. [Scorpions sting because it is their
nature, and Chinese Communists censor the news because it is also their nature]. I think I
do not really agree with what he said because what we have seen during this day and a
half is that the situation is not static. Although the censorship organizations are quite
impressive, we also noted that - whether it is on the Internet, in the press, or in society -
things are happening.
Some journalists are trying to push the envelope. They test the limits on the Internet. It is
true that some of them are arrested, but it is also true that information continues to
circulate on the Internet. So this, I think, is very important. And what is interesting is that
the government also makes concessions, that sometimes it changes policies. Freedom has
been more and more restricted since 2001, but the authorities have never been in a
position to silence divergent voices completely, and so what we are faced with is a very
dynamic situation, where a society which is more and more complex is pushing for some
space for expression. It is true that in times of crisis, such as we are witnessing now, the
government returns to traditional methods to control opinion, to control society.
But still, I think it is a cat and mouse situation. You could say that the authoritarian
government is in place and that it will remain so until it changes its nature. But I think that
change is possible in China. I think that this is what you, as journalists, are supposed to
convey - the complexity of the situation, the multi-faceted aspects of the situation.
I'll now try to provide you with some background about the political framework in which
the Olympic Games are going to happen. First of all, why do the Chinese authorities
consider them so important?
You have to go back to the Opium Wars if you want to understand what's happening. I
think that ever since the English gunships arrived in China, Chinese elites, whether political
or intellectual, have had only one obsession - to make China a strong and rich country
(fuguo qiangbing), to restore its place on the world scene. And this objective unites not
only the political leaders but also the intelligentsia, which has been instrumental in the
struggle for the democratization of China.
This is where the Olympic Games come in. You have the discourse of humiliation. China
was humiliated by the West in the mid-19th Century. Now, it wants to come back. Of
course, one can say that the discourse of humiliation is exaggerated, that it has been a
long time since China was humiliated. But it is still a part of the collective consciousness. It
is important to bear this in mind when we study China, when we try to report on China.
The Communist Party now is saying that the country has had 30 years of peace during
which it could develop. What happened after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 is that the
Communist Party looked at the Soviet example and said that if China went on with

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democratization, it would follow the Soviet Union's lead and disappear. The Tibetans and
the Uighurs would take their autonomy, and the breakup of China would follow.
Elites accepted the discourse of the party. Most of the intellectuals, most economic elites,
most political elites agreed that it was necessary to put aside disagreements and for
everyone to work for the development of China, to make it a strong country. This became
clear after 1992, after Deng Xiaoping's trip to the south.
The economic development triggered by the new policy, which was really impressive
under Jiang Zemin, had various consequences. One was development of huge inequalities,
which started to worry the leadership during the 10 years from 1992 to 2002.
The elites improved their living standards, they improved their symbolic position also.
They enjoyed larger freedom of expression, as long as it was not in public.
But most of the working people, whom the Communist Party supposedly represented - the
workers, the peasants, the laid-off workers (xiagang) and the migrant workers (mingong),
who are the artisans of the Chinese miracle - were left out, and intellectuals didn't care
about that, except for a very small minority.
So, on the one hand, the elites - the managers, the entrepreneurs and the intelligentsia -
supported the party, while, on the other hand, the working people, deprived of access to
any channel of expression, were completely marginalized. The situation was becoming so
dangerous that the leadership realized it had to do something because it threatened the
cardinal principle that stability overrides everything else (wending yadao yiqie).
To maintain stability, it was necessary to give something to the marginalized; and this
happened in the early 21st Century. After 2003, when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao came to
power, the government decided to make a few concessions to society, giving more
latitude to the media and using the rhetoric of law, while continuing to prevent the
emergence of autonomous organizations.
For the Communist Party, the growing inequalities were not a social problem. They were
not a political problem. The government told people that if they had complaints they
should go to the courts. The official media emphasized that Chinese citizens had rights,
human rights, and were entitled to defend them, but these were not guaranteed by an
independent judiciary.
And what happened is that Chinese citizens who were victims of abuse by cadres seized
on this rhetoric and tried to advance their rights by using the law. They "took the fraud at
its own word" (jiaxi zhenchang). But what had been conceived by the authorities as a way
to prevent social discontent from manifesting itself had the opposite effect. Part of the
intelligentsia, especially legal specialists, lawyers and journalists, became interested in the
claims of the people and tried to give a voice to the voiceless - to the peasants, farmers
and workers deprived of their rights. What happened then, of course, was that the
authorities cracked down on lawyers and on human rights activists.

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The situation now - we must face it - is quite bad for human rights, and quite bad for the
marginalized, who have fewer possibilities than before to make their complaints heard.
A good image on the international scene, as I said, is a very important element of the
legitimacy of the Communist Party. It keeps telling its people that it is the only political
force that can restore China’s rightful place in the international community. This is why the
Olympic torch relay was so important to the leaders; when they chose to make it visit the
major countries, they conceived it as a way to show the world the rise of a strong,
harmonious and modern China. When the riots happened in Lhasa, triggering a host of
protests during the relay, the Chinese leaders were confronted by a contradiction. What
could they do? They couldn't back down. They couldn't make concessions in response to
the demonstrations because they feared that would have been a show of weakness.
So what did they do? They chose to reinforce their legitimacy inside the country through
the mobilization of nationalism, which can be strong in the emerging middle classes, at the
risk of damaging China's positive image internationally. This is where we stand now.
But the situation is not so simple for the party leaders. We were confronted with similar
events in 1999, with the bombing by NATO of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, with the
anti-Japanese demonstrations in Beijing and Shanghai in 2005. Every time, after
discontent had been vented, the authorities said it was time to change the rhetoric, to
"transform anger into strength," to turn this energy toward development of the country
and in the present case, for example, to work hard to organize successful Olympics.
Why? Because the success of the present leadership is based on globalization and, if it
mobilizes extreme nationalism for too long, it risks opening itself up to accusations of
selling out the country by opening the doors to multinational companies. The nationalists
could accuse the leadership of responsibility for the humiliation of the nation. So this is
why, in a way, I’m quite optimistic. I think this outbreak of nationalism will pass, sooner
than many people think.

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Background papers:
Beijing's legal obligations
as Olympics Games host
Human Rights in China
In July 2001, the International Olympic Committee awarded Beijing the 2008 Summer
Olympics after a competitive bidding process. The decision was controversial because, in
large part, of China's track record on human rights. In the last seven years, Olympic
preparations exacerbated existing human rights problems and triggered new domestic
protests and criticism. International advocates have raised concerns over crackdowns on
rights defenders and activists, Tibet, and China's role in Darfur.
Domestic and international voices critically linking these human rights problems to the
Olympics are met with objections from Beijing, the International Olympic Committee, and
corporate sponsors that the Olympics are not the proper forum to raise these issues. The
Chinese authorities, however, were the first to raise expectations that the Olympics would
contribute to advancing democracy and human rights, during the Olympic bid process. It
was the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad itself that
outlined its promises and vision for the positive impact of the Games on Chinese society,
the environment, and development.
As the host of the 2008 Games, what are Beijing's obligations? What did Beijing promise
to win the bid? Who is responsible for delivering on these promises? What can various
actors do in the final lead-up to the Olympics to advance compliance and delivery on these
promises and obligations?
Along with the prestigious honor of hosting this international event come international
obligations. Olympic-specific responsibilities include the representations and promises
made by China during the bidding process, set forth in the host city contract, and
elaborated in the Beijing Olympic action plan. Additionally, a host city must uphold the
high ideals of the Olympic Charter, which include the promotion of peace and preservation
of human dignity.
At the international level, China has made a number of commitments to human rights
specified in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the United Nations
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment.
Finally, Chinese law itself includes provisions regarding the fundamental rights of freedom
of speech, freedom of the press, and guarantees of official transparency. Only by honoring
these commitments in a transparent and accountable fashion throughout remaining

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preparations for and during the Games, as well as long after the Games are finished, can
China host a truly successful Olympics.
Changing the rules mid-game
An aspiring Olympic host city must clear many hurdles. For Beijing, it took two attempts,
one in 1993, and the second successful bid in 2001. With the old lobbying practices now
deemed corrupt and unethical, cities had to navigate a complex bureaucratic process set
forth in the new “candidature acceptance procedures” adopted by the Executive Board of
the International Olympic Committee in February 2000.
Applicant cities must present to the Executive Board, through their respective national
Olympic committees, a completed questionnaire that addresses six themes: motivation
and concept, political and public support (including any opposition), general infrastructure,
sports infrastructure (including environmental impact), logistics and experience, financing.
In August 2000, the Executive Board named five cities to proceed as candidate cities:
Beijing, Istanbul, Osaka, Paris and Toronto. These candidate cities had to meet rigorous
application requirements including 10-minute presentations to the board, submit a
candidacy file, together with a non-refundable deposit of $150,000, and host a four-day
site visit by an evaluation commission. The candidacy file had to address 18 themes and
149 questions. Between mid-February and mid-April 2001, the International Olympic
Committee's evaluation commission conducted site visits to each of the cities. As part of
the application requirements, guarantees were required from national, regional, and local
authorities, as well as city and other competent authorities.
Based upon review of the candidacy files and the report, the board drew up the final list of
candidate cities to be submitted to the International Olympic Committee session for
election through secret balloting. The April 3, 2001 evaluation commission's report offered
this assessment of the Beijing bid:
This is a government-driven bid with considerable assistance of the NOC (National
Olympic Committee). The combination of a good sports concept with complete
Government support results in a high quality bid. The Commission notes the
process and pace of change taking place in China and Beijing and the possible
challenges caused by population and economic growth in the period leading up to
2008 but is confident that these challenges can be met. There is an environmental
challenge but the strong government actions and investment in this area should
resolve this and improve the city. It is the Commission's belief that a Beijing Games
would leave a unique legacy to China and to sport and the Commission is confident
that Beijing could organize excellent Games.
On July 13, 2001, in Moscow, the International Olympic Committee voted to award China
the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Despite its failed first Olympic bid in 1993,
despite its serious record of ongoing human rights abuses, and despite achieving a top
rating in only one out of 10 applicant selection categories, Beijing had come from behind
to beat Osaka, Paris, Toronto, and Istanbul.

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From the beginning of its Olympics bid, China set high expectations. Promises made by
government officials and Olympic organizers were influential in Beijing's successful bid. An
official commentary by the Xinhua news agency complimented the International Olympic
Committee for its foresight in awarding the Games to China, a country that seven years
later “will be home to a stable society, a prosperous economy and a well-off population.”
It added, “the country's transportation and environmental situation will be greatly
improved, and the cause of democracy and rule of law will continually advance.”
In February 2001, Beijing's Deputy Mayor, Liu Jingmin, a top Olympic official, said, “By
applying for the Olympics, we want to promote not just the city's development, but the
development of society, including democracy and human rights.” Liu added that a
victorious bid would “help us establish a more just and harmonious society, a more
democratic society, and help integrate China into the world.” Wang Wei, secretary general
of the Beijing bid committee, pledged that the government “will give the media complete
freedom to report when they come to China.”
These promises represent a range of commitments to the International Olympic
Committee, the Chinese people, and the international community, including commitments
on human rights, social and economic development, and press freedom. Yet, since then,
the Chinese authorities have changed their tune, stressing “sovereignty” and that the
“Games are only about competition and athletes.”
The Executive Vice President of the Beijing Organizing Committee, Jiang Xiaoyu, said in
March 2008: “As [International Olympic Committee President] Jacques Rogge said, the
Games is solely a sporting gala that shouldn't be linked with politics.”
On protests along the Olympic torch relay route in Athens, Wang Wei stated: “We are here
to celebrate the Olympic spirit, not to come to a political debate.” Reflecting historical
amnesia, the International Olympic Committee, corporate sponsors, and even foreign
governments are echoing this official Chinese line. With the billions of dollars already
invested in or expected as profit from the Games, it is clear that changing the rules midgame
has become rhetorically, and politically, acceptable.
Beijing's responsibilities as host city
The Beijing Games must be judged within the broad framework of official representations
and promises, domestic law, and the host's ongoing international obligations - including
human rights obligations and the Olympic Charter. Beijing's Olympic-specific obligations
are set forth clearly in the (still not publicly available) host city contract and the 2002
Beijing Olympic action plan.
While Beijing's actual bid candidacy file is not publicly available, the model candidacy file
from the International Olympic Committee's manual for candidate cities for the 2008
Olympics indicates the types of commitments Beijing addressed. These include
information, representations, and guarantees regarding:

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• The safety and the peaceful operation of the Olympic Games;
• Fulfillment of obligations and respect for the Olympic Charter (including the goal of
encouraging the establishment of a peaceful society concerned with preservation
of human dignity);
• Evidence of support of national, regional, and local populations including opinion
polls (must be conducted by internationally recognized research agencies or
organizations), referendums, awareness campaigns;
• Any laws prohibiting or limiting importation of foreign newspapers, periodicals, or
other publications;
• Economic effect on the city and the region;
• Planning, construction and protection of the environment;
• Health system, water and air quality, and arrangements for the Games;
• Security including crime rates, risks posed by “activist minorities” (religious,
political, ethnic, etc.) or terrorist groups in the country or the region.
The host city contract signed by the Beijing authorities, the International Olympic
Committee, and the China National Organizing Committee sets forth the legal, commercial,
and financial rights and obligations of the International Olympic Committee and Beijing.
Despite requests by Tibetan groups, Human Rights in China and others, the Beijing host
city contract has not yet been made public. However, International Olympic Committee
officials, including Rogge, have alluded to provisions in the contract that respect human
rights and instructed the Beijing Organizing Committee to provide complete media access.
The Beijing Olympic action plan lays out in greater detail the overall guidelines and plan
for Olympic preparations. This plan pledges to provide “green Olympics,” “high-tech
Olympics,” “free and open Olympics,” and “people's Olympics.” These lofty aims include
specific standards to which Beijing has promised to hold itself accountable. They
encompass a wide range of obligations, from responsible governance to air quality targets,
security to economic development.
Reporting on and judging performance of Olympic promises
Despite the government's promises to host Olympic Games that will promote and help the
development of human rights, preparations are being used as a justification for further
violations, including forced evictions, closure of migrants' schools, harassment of lawyers,
and tightened media controls.
While the time for an interim assessment has come and gone, past host cities have issued
a post-Olympic assessment. Through its Olympic and other international promises, Beijing

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itself has provided the framework by which the success of these Games should be judged.
The media plays, and will continue to play, an important role in reporting on Beijing's
delivery on those commitments.
We identify below some key concerns related to the promises set forth in the Beijing
Olympic action plan.
Green Olympics. “By 2008, we will achieve the goal of building the capital into an
ecological city that features green hills, clear water, grass-covered ground, and blue sky.”
A green Olympics cannot be expensive cosmetics for just the city of Beijing at the expense
of the surrounding provinces (for example, access to water) or the rest of the country. A
green Olympics by definition must also be responsible for longer term sustainable impacts
on air pollution and protection of water resources. While China's government has taken
some environmental steps, such as planting more trees in Beijing, it has far to go in
tackling major environmental challenges.
Much media attention has focused on the impact of pollution on the athletes participating
in the Games. Rogge has warned that events could be postponed if conditions are
unhealthy, and some athletes say they plan to arrive in Beijing as late as possible to
minimize exposure to pollution, or have refused to participate in certain events altogether.
In assessing a green Olympics, there needs to be greater attention on the serious impacts
of pollution on China's own people. A World Health Organization report estimates that air
and water pollution in China causes some 750,000 premature deaths every year, and
China is home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world.
Beijing's neighboring provinces have faced a decade-long drought. Now Olympics
demands are diverting water to Beijing, threatening the lives of millions of peasant
farmers, according to a senior Chinese official. Olympic preparations have already
exacerbated this precarious water shortage crisis. How will these farmers cope in the final
leadup to the Games and after?
These examples reflect the complex challenges that require long-term solutions, and the
cooperation of other governments, regional organizations, transnational corporations, and
ordinary citizens, as well as the Chinese government itself.
High-Tech Olympics. “We will make all-out efforts to guarantee the security during the
Olympic Games on the basis of a sound social order, reliable public transport and fire
fighting systems, safe medical and health structures, and well planned supporting
measures.”
High-tech Olympics must strike an appropriate balance between security and respect for
human rights required by international standards. This challenge is particularly critical in
light of China's repressive security, censorship, and surveillance system.

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The security technology sectors and systems, in large part provided by foreign
corporations, raise serious concerns. The Olympic organizing committee says it will spend
about $300 million on security. And China's security budget is expected to continue to
grow after 2008 at an annual rate of at least 20 per cent (the country is already the
second largest security equipment market in the world, after the United States). China has
not provided transparency and assurances that sophisticated new security systems will not
be deployed to undermine human rights.
Post-Olympics use. Armed with new security technology acquired for the Olympics,
China will have an even greater capacity to monitor and restrict individual rights beyond
2008. There needs to be international scrutiny and discussion to insure that rights
defenders and vulnerable groups, including ethnic minorities and religious practitioners,
will not be exposed to more effective surveillance and repression.
Biometric data collection. As China collects biometric and other information on
foreigners, including the projected 30,000 journalists entering the country for the Games,
what information will this high-tech surveillance collect? How will the biometric information
(including photographs) collected at airports, subways, public spaces, and Olympics
venues be stored and disseminated? What are the safeguards for insuring privacy as well
as freedom of expression? How will these safeguards fit international standards?
Free and open Olympics. “In the preparation for the Games, we will be open in every
aspect to the rest of the country and the whole world. We will draw on the successful
experience of others and follow the international standards and criteria.”
A free and open Olympics must include respect for freedom of expression and the right to
access and disseminate information. These rights must be respected and advanced for
foreign media, athletes, tourists and other visitors - and for all Chinese people. A free and
open Olympics also requires transparency and accountability.
Access for foreign journalists. Despite new regulations for foreign journalists that went
into effect on Jan. 1, 2007, the rules have been routinely flouted by local officials, and the
forced departures of foreign reporters from Tibet raises concerns about media blackouts in
the face of human rights crises.
A survey by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China found that 95 per cent of its
members think reporting conditions in China are still not up to international standards. If
foreign journalists are vulnerable, what can domestic journalists expect?
Media organizations and non-governmental organizations, including Human Rights in
China, have pressed for extension of the sunset date of the foreign news regulations and
for extension to cover domestic journalists. The final leadup to the Games and the Games
themselves provide an excellent opportunity to test the seriousness and effectiveness of
these guarantees.
Greater transparency and accountability. The development of a number of local and
national open government information (OGI) initiatives should be monitored and tested.

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These efforts introduce the novel presumptions that government information should be
made public and that official agencies are obligated to disclose such information upon
request. The State Council passed a national OGI regulation that will take effect on May 1,
2008, in time for concerned citizens to request previously undisclosed information on
Olympic preparations. Efforts should be made to see whether Olympic-related information
such as budget and expenditures and details of the host city contract could be disclosed.
People's Olympics. “The Olympic Games will give an impetus to economic development
and urban construction and management, and bring about increasing benefits for the
people. We will make the preparations for the Olympic Games a process of substantially
improving the people's living standard, both materially and culturally.”
Inequality has widened in recent years, with growing income disparity between rural and
urban residents. Although the Chinese government has spent large amounts on economic
development in Beijing, development has been accompanied by forcible evictions and
crackdowns. A People's Olympics must advance equitable and sustainable social and
economic development for all of China's people, and respect for economic, cultural, and
social rights, including religious and cultural integrity.
Migrant workers. Although migrant workers provided labor for the construction of
Olympic sites, they were discarded after their work was completed and subject to evictions
and other tactics aimed at keeping them out of the cities as part of the “Olympics cleanup”
campaign. The Ministry of Public Security has demanded that all Chinese cities set up
systems by the end of 2009 to track migrants more easily.
Ethnic minorities. The “war on terror” continues to be used to justify repression of
Uighurs, Tibetans and Mongols. In Beijing, the commoditization of ethnic minorities is
evident in their portrayal as pre-modern and exotic at the National Ethnic Minorities Park.
With the tense situation in Tibet, will the Olympics be a force for encouraging the Chinese
authorities to enter into a dialogue for peaceful resolution and to address the failures of its
policies in the so-called autonomous regions?
Displacement. The number of people displaced by Olympic-related development in
Beijing rose to 1.25 million in early 2007. Another 250,000 are expected to be displaced
during 2008. Issues of compensation, relocation, and preservation of neighborhoods will
require ongoing international attention.
Looking ahead to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and beyond, an investigation of these issues
can advance delivery on the host city's promises and legal obligations. With little time
remaining before the opening ceremonies, the current time frame to consider these
challenging and complex issues is inadequate.
The problems that China faces have deep and historic political, legal, and cultural roots.
Considering a longer horizon, Liu Jianchao, foreign ministry spokesman, has stated, “The
Chinese Government will always be dedicated to improving and protecting human rights,
be it prior to, or in the midst of or beyond the Beijing Olympics.”

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The Olympics provide an invaluable opportunity to get greater traction on addressing
these problems. Additionally, the impact of the 2008 Games on the Olympic movement will
extend beyond China, as it affects the real interests of the International Olympic
Committee, corporate sponsors, partners, and suppliers and future host cities. The
international and domestic media in particular are critical to the effort - the final push - to
hold Beijing accountable to its obligations and promises, and to insure successful Games.
Resource list:
IOC Evaluation Commission report on Beijing's 2001 Bid:
http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_299.pdf
2002 Beijing Olympics Action Plan:
http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/fcs/pdf/boap.doc
IOC web site:
http://www.olympic.org/uk/index_uk.asp
BOCOG official web site:
http://en.beijing2008.ccn/bocog/
Human Rights in China's Take Action Campaign, IR2008 web site: http://www.ir2008.oorg/
Human Rights in China, "2008 and Beyond," China Rights Forum, No. 3, 2007:
http://hrichina.org/public/contents/45071
Human Rights in China, "Human Rights: Everyone's Business", China Rights Forum, No. 1, 2008:
http://www.hrichina.org/public/contents/47993
September 2007 HRIC Open Letter to the IOC, October 2007 Response from the IOC:
http://hrichina.org/public/PDFs/CRF.4.2007/CRF-2007-4_Transparency.pdf
Minky Worden, ed., China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Seven
Stories Press, forthcoming, May 2008).

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China and the Internet:
history, economy and human rights
Wolfgang Kleinwächter
Professor of Internet Policy and Regulation, University of Aarhus, Denmark
China has the world's most dynamic Internet market. In December 2007, there were 210 million
Chinese people on line. Right after the United States, with 215 million Internet users, China had
the second largest Internet community. With a growth rate of 53 per cent in 2007 and a
penetration rate of only 21 per cent compared to more than 80 per cent in the United States there
is still an enormous market potential. It can be expected that China will soon be the leading nation
for Internet connection.
Yet China also has one of the most restrictive Internet domestic policies. When it comes to
freedom of expression on the Internet, a mix of governmental regulation, policing activities and
technical mechanisms keeps the flow of information content via the Internet under political
control. Critical web sites are taken down, Internet cafés are closed, cyber-dissidents are arrested.
The annual Internet Freedom Report produced by Reporters Without Borders ranks China 164 out
of 170 countries.
History
The Internet is still a new medium in China. The country was connected to the Internet in 1987.
But until 2000, the Internet was practically non-existent in Chinese daily life. When the first e-mail
was sent from a server of the Institute for Computer Applications of the Technical University in
Bejing to a server of Karlsruhe University in Germany on Sept. 20, 1987, practically no one took
note of that historic event. It took more than 15 years to reach the level of 1 million users in a
country with a population of 1.3 billion.
Establishment of a network connection between Bejing and Karlsruhe was the result of a joint
Chinese-German academic research project that had started in the mid-1980s. Werner Zorn of
Karlsruhe University, one of the fathers of the German Internet, was deeply involved in connecting
Germany to the Internet when he linked in 1984 a university server in Karlsruhe to a server of the
US Computer Science Network. Three years later, Zorn became also one of the fathers of the
Internet for China.
When Zorn visited Beijing in 1987, he worked with Wan Yung Feng of the Chinese Commission on
Science & Technology. Both managed to instal a name server for China's .cn domain and to
connect it to the name server of Germany's .de domain. The first e-mail text was rather simple:
“Across the Great Wall we reach now all corners of the world.” That short sentence was the first
step on the long Chinese march into cyber-space. 5
A simple technical solution was in fact a rather problematic and complicated political project. It
came during the Cold War. On the one hand, NATO regulations did not allow transfer of highly
sensitive communications technology and relevant software to Communist countries. On the other
hand, Chinese authorities were very suspicious of “Western spies” and “ideological diversion.”
But unwatched by government representatives, Zorn and his colleagues used their creativity and
flexibility to make the project happen. A great help was also Zorn’s international reputation, his

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recognition within the Internet community and his good personal contacts with Internet pioneers
in the United States, who also became excited about the challenge of helping Chinese academics
open the door to the West.
After a series of individual efforts on various levels, the name server of the Chinese country-code
top-level domain .cn was finally successfully linked to the Internet root server system. Zorn helped
- in cooperation with Stephen S. Wolff of the US National Science Foundation and Lawrence H.
Landweber, co-founder of the US Computer Science Network (which connected many countries to
the Internet in the 1980s) - to introduce the .cn root zone file into the data base of the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority and to get final approval by the US government to authorize
publication of the .cn root zone file in the A-root server in 1990.
The two-letter code .cn was listed on the ISO 3166 list, 6 a geographic coding standard published
by the International Organization for Standardization. From the early 1980s, the ISO list was used
by Internet pioneer Jon Postel, of the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern
California in Marina del Rey, as a data base for the delegation of the management of country-code
top-level domains. Postel also managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority data base and
the global Domain Name System from its creation in the early 1980s.
Then, delegation of a country-code top-level domain was done mainly with a handshake and
without great formalities, to a trusted manager with Jon Postel's personal confidence. Government
authorities were not involved. Nevertheless, authorization for publication of a top-level domain
root zone file in the A-root server needed confirmation by the US National Science Foundation,
which funded Internet development in the US from the mid-1980s. It also required authorization
by the US Department of Commerce.
Postel delegated management of the .cn to Zorn. When he returned to Karlsruhe in 1988, he
continued to manage the .cn domain. A copy of the relevant data base of the .cn name server
remained in Bejing, but the domain’s day-to-day management was in Zorn's hands.
CNNIC: From 10,000 to 10 million registered domain names
In 1994, management of the .cn domain was handed over to the Chinese Academic Network, a
subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Three years later, in 1997, the Chinese Internet
Network Information Center (CNNIC) was established and took over full responsibility for
management of the .cn domain.
Fewer than 10,000 Internet domain names were then registered under .cn. This number grew at a
marginal growth rate, to 50,000 by 2001 and to 430,000 in 2004. The explosion started in 2005,
when the number of registered domain names crossed the 1 million mark. By the end of 2006,
there were 1.8 million domain names registered, by mid-2007,
6 million and by the end of 2007, 9 million. 7 With this number, the .cn registry had
become the world's second largest country code top-level domain after DENIC, the central registry
for all domains under the top level domain .de., with 11.8 million registered domain names.
The China Internet Network Information Center is the main Internet body in China. It is a
government agency but was founded as a non-profit organization under Chinese law on June 3,
1997. It takes its orders from the Ministry of Information Industry for its daily business, while it is
administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A steering committee, a working group of wellknown
experts and commercial representatives from the domestic Internet community, supervises
and evaluates the structure, operation and administration of the center.

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The legal basis for the center is laid down in the China Internet Domain Name Regulations of Sept.
28, 2004, which state that any person or organization has the right to register a domain name on
the first-come, first-served principle used worldwide.
Some names are blacklisted and excluded from registration, however. According to the regulations
“any of the following contents shall not be included in any domain name registered and used by
any organization or individual:
• Those that are against the basic principles prescribed in the Constitution;
• Those that jeopardize national security, leak state secrets, intend to overturn the
government, or disrupt of state integrity;
• Those that harm national honor and national interests;
• Those that instigate hostility or discrimination between different nationalities, or disrupt
national solidarity;
• Those that violate the state religion policies or propagate cult and feudal superstition;
• Those that spread rumors, disturb public order or disrupt social stability;
• Those that spread pornography, obscenity, gambling, violence, homicide, terror or instigate
crimes;
• Those that insult, libel others and infringe other people's legal rights and interests; or
• Other contents prohibited by laws, rules and administrative regulations.” 8
Various other regulations by the Ministry of Information Industry specify the mandate and the
tasks of the Internet Network Information Center in more detail, including the “CNNIC
Implementing Rules of Domain Name Registration” from 2002 9 and the “Rules for CNNIC Domain
Name Dispute Resolution Policy” from 2007. 10
The center has the full responsibility for the registration of domain names in the .cn domain and
the allocation of Internet protocols, the numbers that identify each computer connected to the
Internet. It is responsible for management of relevant data bases, for technical research and
statistical surveys. The center hosts the secretariat of the Internet Society of China, an
independent, purely Chinese organization. It is also the authorized contact for international
Internet organizations, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN), a private non-profit corporation that manages critical Internet resources - root servers,
domain names, and Internet protocol addresses - on behalf of the global Internet community. The
corporation was established in 1998 by the US government, based in Marina del Rey, California.
Mainland China is officially a member of the ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee but does
not participate in regular meetings while Taiwan remains a full member. However, China hosted an
official board meeting of the corporation in Shanghai in 2001. Recently, ICANN's Board Chairman,
Peter Dengath Trush, got a warm welcome in Beijing and met the Director General of the Internet
Network Information Center, Mao Wei, on Feb. 19, 2008. 11 Since 2007, the center has officially
been a member of ICANN's Country Code Name Supporting Organization.
Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan
Next to the .cn Domain there are also country code top-level domains for Hong Kong .hk
(managed by the Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Ltd. /HKIRC with 152,000
registered domain names in 2007) 12 and for Macao .mo (managed by the Macao Network
Information Center at the University of Macao 13 with only 2,075 registered domain names in 2007).
Both registries are managed independently, have their own rules and individual policies but
operate under the same general regulations as CNNIC.

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The country code top-level domain .tw of Taiwan is managed by the Taiwan Network Information
Center (TWNIC) with about 50,000 registered domain names. 14 TWNIC is also a member of
ICANN's Country Names Supporting Organization and stresses its independent status. As noted
above, the government of Taiwan is also a full member of ICANN's Government Advisory
Committee, a status that is not accepted by the People's Republic of China. Regardless of the
political controversy over Taiwan, there is a businesslike relationship between the Chinese and
Taiwanese Network Information Centers on the working level, particularly on technical issues.
Chinese individuals and institutions may also register domain names under a generic top level
domain such as .com, .net, .org or .info. But the popularity of such registration is shrinking.
Domain name registration under .com still enjoys a high growth rate. Compared to registrations
under .cn, the .com domain, managed by the US company VeriSign, is losing ground. In 2005,
about 40 per cent of all domain names in China were registered unde .com. By the end of 2007
this had fallen to 20 per cent. Nevertheless, there are 2.4 million domain name registrations under
.com in China. The domain .net is the third strongest Internet domain in China with a market
share of 3.3 per cent - a total of 390,000 domain name registrations. Others like .org or .info have
no more than 1.1 per cent market share or slightly more than 100,000 registrations. 15 In March
2006, the Network Information Center started to register domain names under .com and .net with
Chinese characters but without the involvement of VeriSign.
Economy
Until the late 1990s, there was no such thing as a domain name market or an Internet economy in
China. Only a limited number of academics from technical research institutions had access to the
Internet. Today, China is a rapidly growing market for the local and global Internet economy. With
more than 200 million Internet users in China's mainland, not only domain name registration but
all kinds of online applications and services offer untold business opportunities.
The primary domain name market had a growth rate of 190.4 per cent in 2007. That growth is
bound to continue after full introduction of domain names with Chinese characters, known as
internationalized domain names.
Growth of domain registration is mainly driven by market needs for e-commerce and other
commercial applications and services. Yet, e-commerce is still in its infancy in China. According to
a statistical report by the Network Information Center for 2007, only 22.1 per cent of the Internet
users do shopping on line. For 2007, this represented no more than 46.4 milion yuan (or 4.2
million euros). In the United States, 71 per cent of Internet users shop online and the volume of e-
commerce is more than $5 billion. 16
Search engines, Internet service providers and on-line games
Search engines are one of the key Internet markets in China. For a number of years, the market
leader has been the national Internet search engine www.baidu.cn with a market share of 62 per
cent. 17 The second most popular, www.google.cn, has a 24 per cent market share. The remaining
14 per cent is distributed among various Chinese search engines and Chinese branches of
international portals like www.yahoo.cn or www.msn.com.cn.
The market for Internet service providers is growing fast. There are about 100, nine of which have
allocated more than a million Internet protocol addresses to customers. China Telecom with 47
million allocated IP addresses and a market share of about 30 per cent is the leader, followed by
China Netcom (25 million), CERNET (12 million) and China Tietong Corp. (7 million).

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One of the most dynamic Internet markets in China is the online entertainment industry led by
Shanda Entertainment, followed by Softworld and ZT Network Science Technology.
Kou Xiao Wei, of the audiovisual and Internet publication department of the General
Administration of Press and Publication, told the People's Daily in February 2007: “The online
Chinese gaming market has become the biggest internationally recognized, potential market. In
2006, the scale of the online Chinese gaming market reached 6.54 billion yuan (about 600 million
euros), an increase of 73.5 per cent from 2005, much higher than the forecast 46.3 per cent. Such
strong growth can be attributed to the ‘free service’ model. It is undeniable that there are still
gaps between China and other nations in terms of software development. However, the innovative
business mode of Chinese game providers has won approval from many of their foreign
counterparts.” 18
Beyond the Olympics: Leapfrogging into the next-generation networks?
The Olympic Games are seen as a driving force for dramatic improvement of the national Internet
infrastructure and for introduction of new Internet-based applications and services with long-term
economic and social consequences. China wants to become the world's leader in information
technology by 2015.
Ruoqi Guan, president of the China Network Communications Group, told the Pacific
Telecommunication Conference in Honolulu in January 2007 that there will be 300 million
broadband connections for high-speed Internet access in China after the Olympics. That would
make China the world leader in broadband connections. Guan said this will make it easy for
Internet users in China to switch also to Internet telephony and television (VOIP and IPTV). In
2000, there were fewer than a million broadband connections. 19
There are plans to turn Bejing, with its 17.4 million inhabitants, and other Chinese urban centers
into “wireless cities,” where everyone has fulltime free Internet access. According to Kai Li Kan of
the School of Economics & Management at the University for Posts & Telecommunications in
Bejing, such a model would be “led by the government, built by the people.” 20 In the Access to
Knowledge conference at Yale University in April 2007, Kai dreamed of an Internet “of the people,
by the people, for the people,” recalling Abraham Lincoln’s characterization in his Gettysburg
Address of the ideal government. 21
Internet Usage: More e-entertainment than e-commerce
The Internet in China is now mainly used for information and entertainment, less for e-
government or e-commerce. According to a report by the Network Information Center, the most
popular Internet services in China are online music and Instant messaging/chat rooms. 181 million
users (85.6 per cent) listened to online music in the second half of 2007. Heavy use of online
music also explains the success of the search engine www.baidu.cn which offers special searches
for MP3 files.
More than 170 million Internet users (or 81.4 per cent) in China had used instant messaging or
had gone to a chat room in the second half of 2007. For about 40 per cent of users, this is the
most important and first reason for use of the Internet. It is especially popular among young
people between 18-24 years, of whom 96 perc ent regularly use instant messaging. Interestingly,
instant messaging is used more in underdeveloped regions in the west of China than in the
booming regions on its east coast. 22
Other top applications are online video (161 million or 76.9 per cent), search engines (152 million
or 72.4 per cent) and online news (154 million or 73.6 per cent). Of special importance are

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Internet games (124 million or 59.3 per cent). Online game-playing is particularly popular among
young people. About three quarters of youngsters below 18 play online games regularly, spending
around 10 hours per week on the activity. Low- income and low-education people make the
highest use of Internet games, compared to other groups. Internet game-playing is even more
popular than e-mailing, with 118 million (or 56.5 per cent) using e-mail services.
Personal web sites and blogs have a high growth rate. The Network Information Center report
says that in late 2007 nearly 25 per cent of Chinese Internet users had their own web sites, which
means that there are nearly 50 million individual blogs. Less popular are online job hunting (21
million or 10.4 per cent), online payment (33 million or 15.8 per cent), online education (38 million
or 18.2 per cent) and online banking (40 million or 19.2 per cent). Official e-government services,
according to the Network Information Center, are underused. Only a quarter of China's Internet
users use the services offered by the national and local authorities.
While the Chinese government supports development of a national Internet economy by
encouraging e-commerce and other commercial activities on the Internet, it tries to keep
control of the national domain name space and in particular control over content distributed via
the Internet within China.
Human Rights
Article 35 of the 1982 constitution guarantees, that “Citizens of the People's Republic of China
enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of
demonstration.” 23
Article 40 guarantees the freedom and privacy of correspondence: “No organization or individual
may, on any ground, infringe upon the freedom and privacy of citizens' correspondence except in
cases where, to meet the needs of state security or of investigation into criminal offences, public
security or procuratorial organs are permitted to censor correspondence in accordance with
procedures prescribed by law.” 24
According to Article 41, citizens have the right to criticize and make suggestions to any state organ
or official. “Citizens have the right to make to relevant state organs complaints and charges
against, or exposures of, violation of the law or dereliction of duty by any state organ or
functionary.” But the article adds that “fabrication or distortion of facts with the intention of libel or
frame-up is prohibited.” 25
Regardless of the liberal language of the constitution, China is widely seen as one of the world's
most restrictive countries when it comes to freedom of expression on the Internet. There is a huge
gap between theory and practice. All the constitutional rights and freedoms are conditioned by
general provisions to protect national security, public order and state secrets. In cases of conflict,
the interests of the state or the government have a higher value than the rights of individuals.
With references to the “higher values” of society, censorship is justified, and individual rights and
freedoms are often reduced to a low level, particularly when sensitive political issues are at stake.
“The harmonious Internet”
The concept of “the harmonious Internet” propagated by the Chinese government 26 is designed to
“clean” the Internet of criminal activities, piracy, pornography and “bad information.”
Philosophically, it is inspired by a mix of Confucianism, a special interpretation of the Ying-Yang
principle and power politics of the Communist Party. To simplify, the concept says that all good
things on the Internet should be promoted, but bad things should be suppressed.

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From a Western perspective, the problem is the very vague definitions of what constitutes bad
information. There are no independent or neutral third parties with authority to evaluate concrete
conflicts between rights and freedoms of individual citizens and the political interests of the State
or government.
The Chinese government uses various means to implement the concept of a “harmonious
Internet.” They include:
• Government regulation (there are more than 30 individual content-related Internet
regulations both on the national and local level);
• Technical means, such as the blocking and filtering of unwanted content;
• Policing the net;
• Punishing individuals identified as violators of government regulations.
The State Council Information Office has the chief mandate to regulate the Internet, but other
security agencies in mainland China also have a say.
In September 2000, State Council Order No. 292, created the first content restrictions for Internet
content providers.
China-based web sites may not link to overseas news web sites or carry news from overseas
media without specific approval. Only “licensed print publishers” have the authority to publish
news on line. Unlicensed web sites that wish to broadcast news may only publish information
already published by other news media. These sites must obtain approval from state information
offices and from the State Council Information Agency.
Art. 14 of this order, gives Chinese officials full access to any kind of sensitive information they
wish. Internet providers must keep records for 60 days and are held responsible for “ensuring the
legality of any information disseminated through their services.” 27
The Golden Shield Project
A key element is the so-called “Golden Shield Project,” which critical Western observers also call
the “Great Chinese Firewall.” The project is overseen by the Ministry of Public Security. The
Chinese government sees it as a main instrument to guarantee the stability and security of the
Internet in China, to combat “bad information” and to work for a “healthy Internet.”
According to Wikipedia the following methods are used to block "bad content":
• IP blocking. Access to a certain IP address is denied. If the target web site is hosted in a
shared hosting server, all web sites on the same server will be blocked. This affects all IPbased
protocols such as HTTP, FTP and POP. A typical circumvention method is to find
proxies that have access to the target web sites, but proxies may be jammed or blocked,
and some web sites, such as Wikipedia (when editing), also block proxies. Some large web
sites like Google have allocated additional IP addresses to circumvent the block, but later
the block was extended to cover the new IPs.
• DNS filtering and redirection. Don't resolve domain names, or return incorrect IP addresses.
This affects all IP-based protocols such as HTTP, FTP and POP. A typical circumvention
method is to find a domain name server that resolves domain names correctly, but domain
name servers are subject to blockage as well, especially IP blocking. Another workaround is
to bypass DNS if the IP address is obtainable from other sources and is not blocked.
Examples are modifying the Hosts file or typing the IP address instead of the domain name
in a web browser.

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• URL filtering. Scan the requested Uniform Resource Locator (URL) string for targeted key
words, regardless of the domain name specified in the URL. This affects the HTTP protocol.
Typical circumvention methods are to use escaped characters in the URL, or to use
encrypted protocols such as VPN and TLS/SSL.
• Packet filtering. Terminate TCP packet transmissions when a certain number of
controversial key words are detected. This affects all TCP-based protocols such as HTTP,
FTP and POP, but search engine results pages are more likely to be censored. Typical
circumvention methods are to use encrypted connections - such as VPN and TLS/SSL - to
escape the HTML content, or by reducing the TCP/IP stack's MTU/MSS to reduce the
amount of text contained in a given packet.
• Connection reset. If a previous TCP connection is blocked by the filter, future connection
attempts from both sides will also be blocked for up to 30 minutes. Depending on the
location of the block, other users or web sites may also be blocked if the communication is
routed to the location of the block. A circumvention method is to ignore the reset packet
sent by the firewall.
• Web feed blocking. Increasingly, incoming URLs starting with the words "rss," "feed," or
"blog" are blocked.
• Reverse surveillance. Computers accessing certain web sites including Google are
automatically exposed to reverse scanning from the ISP in an apparent attempt to extract
further information from the "offending" system. 28
Control is exercised mainly through the Internet service providers, which must follow government
instructions on blocking suspected Internet protocol numbers and domain names, and transfer
individual contact data to Chinese law enforcement in special cases where the government sees a
breach of law. This is mainly with regard to criminal activities and pornography, efforts to
undermine national security and public order, revealing “state secrets,” and publishing “bad news.”
Another control measure is strong regulation of Internet cafés, where many Chinese, particularly in
rural areas, access the web. Internet café providers must follow strict regulations, or risk closure.
There is no anonymity for individual Internet café users, who must register and give their personal
contact data before getting access to a computer.
The “Regulations on the Administration of Internet Access Service Business Establishments”
(Internet cafés) of Sept. 29, 2002, state in Art. 23: “Units operating Internet Access Service
Business Establishments shall examine, register, and keep a record of the identification card or
other effective document of those customers who go online. The contents of the registration and
records shall be maintained for at least 60 days, and shall be provided to the cultural and public
security agencies for examination in accordance with the law. Registration contents and records
shall not be altered or destroyed during this period.” 29
Can it be Circumvented?
There are numerous studies by Western universities, including one by the Berkman Center of
Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, on Internet censorship in China. 30 There is no clear and
consistent policy. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of New
Mexico have found that the Golden Shield Project is not a true firewall since banned material can
sometimes pass through several routers or through the entire system without being blocked. 31 It
differs also from region to region. Web sites that are not accessible in the western part of China
can sometimes be easily accessed in Shanghai.

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Servers in Hong Kong obviously have more individual freedom than servers in Beijing. There are
also variations at different times. There are reports that during summit meetings or other official
events with high-level Western presence, forbidden web sites are accessible but are blocked again
after the events. The New York Times has observed that “the government's filtering, while
comprehensive, is not total. One day a banned site might temporarily be visible, if the routers are
overloaded - or if the government suddenly decides to tolerate it. The next day the site might
disappear again.” 32
Other reports document that the firewall is rather easily circumvented by determined
parties using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and SSH connections to outside mainland
China are not blocked, so circumventing all of the censorship and monitoring features of the Great
Firewall is easy for those who have available such secure connection methods to computers
outside mainland China. Anonymizer Inc. provides a free service to allow uncensored and
anonymous browsing in China. The software is available through a number of sources, including a
China-accessible web site.
Psiphon, a software project designed by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, is another
circumvention technology that works through social networks of trust and is designed to help
Internet users bypass content-filtering systems.
Furthermore, Tor (The Onion Router), a free software program, enables users to communicate
anonymously on the Internet. Neither the Tor web site nor the Tor network are blocked, making
Tor an easily acquired and effective tool for circumvention of the censorship controls. Tor allows,
among other things, uncensored downloads and uploads, although no guarantee can be made on
freedom from repercussions.
In addition to Tor, there are various HTTP/HTTPS tunnel services, which work like Tor. At least
one of them, Your Freedom, is confirmed to be working from China and also offers encryption
features for the transmitted traffic.
Some legal scholars have pointed out that the frequency with which the government issues new
regulations on the Internet demonstrates their ineffectiveness. New regulations never refer to the
previous regulations, which then seem to be forgotten.
Punishment of cyber-dissidents and self-censorship
Expectations that in the lead-up to the Olympic Games the restrictive system would be
substantially liberalized were disappointed following the unrest in Tibet. Numerous web sites were
blocked, blogs were taken down and individuals who uploaded pictures or videos of violence in
Lhasa were arrested.
The number of cases where Chinese Internet users are jailed for distributing “bad content” via the
Internet is growing. The recent annual report of Reporters Without Borders lists nearly 50 cases in
2007 in which individuals or journalists were jailed and given Draconian sentences of several years
in prison, just for making critical statements that, in the eyes of the Chinese government,
undermined national security, public order or were seen as revealing “state secrets.” 33
These cases have produced growing self-censorship. Not only individual bloggers, but also
professional journalists are increasingly careful about expressing their views, particularly on critical
political affairs. One journalist was quoted in the Reporters Without Borders report as saying that
in his newspaper staffers now wait for news from the official news agency Xinhua before writing
their own comments, to avoid trouble with local or national authorities.

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The role of US Internet companies
A special case is the Yahoo affair of 2005. The Chinese branch of Yahoo Inc. disclosed the
individual contact details of cyber-dissidents leading to sentences of several years in prison. This
case produced a storm of protest in the West. Human rights groups accused US companies of
helping the Chinese government's censorship and of ignoring human rights obligations. Microsoft,
Google and Cisco - all very active in the Chinese Internet market - also became targets of such
Western criticism.
The US Senate held a special hearing on the issue in February 2006. 34 Representatives of the socalled
“Gang of the Four” acknowledged the human rights problem in China but partly rejected the
criticisms of US government representatives and human rights groups.
Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft argued that they must respect local legislation when they do
business in China, just as Chinese companies must respect US laws when they do business in the
United States. They said it was beyond the powers of a US company to change Chinese laws and
that it is rather the concern of the US government to use its diplomatic influence.
Google explained in detail that they are well aware of the human rights deficiencies in China and
the risks of doing business there. On the other hand, as in any other country where Google is
active, they must follow national legislation when they operate in the local market. Consequently,
they filter references to content that is illegal under Chinese law but give as much information as
possible to its Chinese users about blocked and censored web sites. Furthermore, they avoid
hosting data containing criticisms of China and information on individual Chinese Internet users on
servers located in China.
Thus, www.google.cn is rather different from www.google.com. Users of www.google.cn will get
no links to web sites that are considered “illegal”under Chinese law. But Google informs Chinese
users that such content is available and can be reached via www.google.com. Google applies the
same approach in other countries like Germany or France where web sites with Nazi content are
illegal under national laws and so are not shown in searches on www.google.de (Germany) or
www.google.fr (France).
Google also does not respond to phone calls from Chinese authorities with requests to hand over
the stored data of individual users. If it gets such phone calls, it asks for a written request
referring to existing legislation. Practice has shown that many such phone requests are not
followed up with written requests.
Diplomatic negotiations. Balancing individual rights with state interests
Internet freedom in China has also become controversial internationally. At the United Nations
World Summits on the Information Society in 2002 and 2005, at the UN's Internet Governance
Forum and at the newly established UN Human Rights Council, the issue has been debated by
government representatives and other interested parties from the private sector, civil society and
the technical and academic community.
Diplomatic efforts to improve the situation have so far produced only to limited results and have
not gone beyond reconfirmation of existing international human rights instruments, notably Art. 19
and Art. 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Art. 19 guarantees to everyone
the right to freedom of expression and opinion, which includes “freedom to hold opinions without
interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers,” while Art. 29 stipulates that “everyone has duties to the community in

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which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible” and that “in the exercise
of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by
law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms
of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in
a democratic society.” 35
In democratic societies, conflicts between the individual's freedom of expression and the
governmental right to protect public order are settled by independent courts or neutral third
parties on a case-by-case basis, generally giving individual rights and freedoms highest priority. In
China, priority is given to the State's collective rights of “public order” and “national security.”
How to balance such conflicting values in concrete cases involving publications on the Internet in
China has also been frequently discussed at international academic conferences. During a July
2007 meeting in Paris of the International Association of Media and Communication Research, a
Chinese scholar recognized, on one hand, that there has been substantial progress on individual
rights of freedom of expression, including the Internet, during the last 20 years. What would have
been impossible in 1987 is now common practice, he said. On the other hand, there are still
taboos which, when ignored by individuals, are not tolerated by the government and lead to heavy
punishment. The “Chinese taboos” he mentioned in particular were the three Ts (Tianamen, Tibet
and Taiwan) as well as references to Falun Gong. 36
Another scholar, Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American professor at the University of Hong Kong, said
that many in China take a long-term perspective. “Chinese people have a 5,000-year view of
history,” he said. “You ban a web site, and they're like: 'Oh, give it time. It'll come back.'” 37
Violation of human rights as a trade barrier ?
There are two schools of thought among Western academics and non-government organizations in
this field: One group argues that with more economic progress, a higher living standard and a new
self-confident, well-educated generation, the spaces for individual freedom will gradually grow.
The other group does not believe in such an evolutionary concept.
Under discussion is, among other things, a proposal to classify the violation of human rights,
particularly censorship measures against freedom of information, as forming trade barriers. Under
World Trade Organization arrangements, violations of international treaties to protect intellectual
property rights are already defined as trade barriers.
As recent experience has shown, the Chinese government, after pressure from WTO member
states, has undertaken concrete actions against online piracy, to guarantee the protection of
intellectual property rights under its international obligations, thus avoiding negative consequences
for its economic interests. In contrast, violation of international obligations under global legal
human rights agreements has had almost no economic consequences for countries like China.
Cold War experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, notably the effects of the Helsinki Agreements on
Cooperation and Security in Europe, might provide interesting leads for action, but it remains to be
seen whether such mechanisms would also work in the rather different political, economic and
cultural context of China.
Internet governance at the UN World Summit on the Information Society
During the first UN World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, the Chinese Delegation
played an active role, particularly in discussions of human rights and of Internet governance.

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The Chinese government challenged in particular the evolution of governance mechanisms for the
management of critical Internet resources such as domain names, root server and IP addresses,
which are led by the private sector and executed by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, or ICANN, which operates under a contract with the US government that is scheduled to
expire in October 2009.
China argued that the principle of private sector leadership was good for the early days of the
Internet, with about a million users. With about a billion users worldwide, critical Internet
resources should now be governed by governments, China contended. A proposal to shift
responsibility for root servers, domain names and IP addresses from ICANN to the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) or to create a new intergovernmental Internet body
in the UN system was rejected by the US government, the European Union, private sector and civil
society but was supported by a number of developing countries like Brazil, India, Pakistan, South
Africa and some Arab states. With lack of an accepted definition of Internet governance, another
conflict was over what “Internet governance” actually means. Some governments advocated a
narrow definition, others a broad one.
The controversy - private sector leadership versus governmental leadership - was not settled in
Geneva. The compromise was to ask UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to create a Working Group
on Internet Governance with a mandate to define governance, to identify the public policy aspects
of Internet governance and to specify the roles of the various stakeholders.
The group was established as a multi-stakeholder body with the full and equal involvement of
governments, private sector and civil society representatives from developed and developing
countries. The Chinese representative was Qiheng Hu, advisor to the Science & Technology
Commission of the Ministry of Information Industry and former Vice President of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. 38
The group's report, presented in July 2005, paved the way for a grand compromise during the
second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. Based on a “broad
definition” of Internet governance, it concluded that the Internet should not be
governed by one single unit but by a global mechanism, that included various stakeholders -
governmental as well as non-governmental - in their respective roles.
The working group proposed neither governmental nor private sector leadership for the broad
range of Internet issues but recommended a “multi-stakeholder approach.” It encouraged the
various players in such a “multilayer-mutilayer mechanism” to enhance their communication,
coordination and cooperation.
After the presentation of the group's report, China no longer insisted on the transfer of
responsibilities from ICANN to the intergovernmental sector ITU, but agreed finally to create a
multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Forum as a discussion body, rather than create a new
intergovernmental body with decision-making powers. China supported starting “enhanced
cooperation” amongst concerned international organizations, including ICANN and ITU in the
“Tunis Agenda for the Information Society.” 39
The first priority for China at Tunis was recognition of the principle of sovereignty over its national
domain name space. The Tunis Agenda’s Paragraph 63 stipulated that “countries should not be
involved in decisions regarding another country's country-code top-level domain” and that “their
legitimate interests, as expressed and defined by each country, in diverse ways, regarding

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decisions affecting their ccTLDs, need to be respected, upheld and addressed via a flexible and
improved framework and mechanisms.” 40
That assurance, that China has legitimate sovereignty rights under international law eased the way
for the Chinese to join the compromise on the Internet Governance Forum and the process of
enhanced cooperation. In practice, it is a de facto recognition of ICANN and the principle of private
sector leadership for management of critical Internet resources. 41
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
In the public consultations on the Internet Governance Forum, the Chinese representative
proposed to include also the issues of critical Internet resources as a subject of discussion, a
proposal which was broadly accepted. The Forum is, however, is not a negotiating body and has
no decision-making powers. Its concept is to promote multi-stakeholder debate, to exchange
ideas, information and arguments and to send “inspirational messages” to specialized bodies that
may make decisions.
Within the Forum, which first met in Athens in October 2006, China gave the issue of “cybersecurity”
highest priority. During the Forum’s following sessio, in Rio de Janeiro in November 2007,
the Internet Society of China and the China Association for Science & Technology organized a
workshop on the “new culture of cyber-security.” There, Sihan Qing, Director General of the
Engineering Research Center for Information Security Technology under the Chinese Academy of
Sciences proposed a document called a “Framework on World Norm of Internet (Version 2.0).”
That document is drafted like an international treaty, with rights and duties for various
stakeholders. The author says he does not intend to present it as a draft convention. It is “neither
a legislative regulation, nor a technical standard, it is rather a self-disciplinary agreement,” Sihan
Qing said. Among its proposed principles are:
• It is requested that all information created for, and contributed to, the Internet be
trustworthy and valuable for the evolution of human being and world prosperity.
• The contents created for, and contributed to, the Internet should be trustworthy and
valuable for maintaining human ethics and morality, for the protection of privacy and
human rights, for the protection of all people, particularly women and children, disabled
people and weak groups of people.
• The contents created for, and contributed to, the Internet should be trustworthy and
valuable to all nations and people, regardless of race or creed.
• It is requested that network operators take on responsibility to keep the high reliability and
high quality of services.
• It is requested that the users of Internet strictly observe the related regulations when
accessing and utilizing the Internet.
• All nations and individuals should go along shoulder-to-shoulder to take all measures to
defeat various attacks and cyber-crimes, such as Trojans, viruses, worms, spyware, spam
and phishing.
The document calls for a new international Internet authority to monitor the quality of services,
diagnose operational faults and arbitrate disputes. 42
The proposed “Framework on World Norm Internet 2.0” has not so far received formal backing of
the Chinese government. As noted above, the Internet Governance Forum is not a decisionmaking
body and formal proposals such as the framework are not subjects of negotiation. But the
drafters have said they hope it will eventually be adopted - where and by whom being left open. It

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remains to be seen whether such ideas will stimulate further debate and lead to political actions in
relevant institutions and organizations, including intergovernmental organizations.
Looking to the future: Toward a fragmented Internet?
How will the Internet look in 10 years and what role China will play in the Internet of the future?
The list of challenges is long: Access, cyber-security, diversity, openness, next-generation
networks, network neutrality, non-fixed location radio frequency identification, mobile Internet etc.
When it comes to management of critical Internet resources, there are two key issues in which
China will have to play a crucial role: internationalized domain names (iDNs) and IPv6 addresses.
One of the key Internet problems for China is the introduction of internationalized domain names.
When the domain name system was invented by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris 25 years ago, it
was based on the ASCII code, a shortened version of the Latin alphabet. This has put individuals
and institutions using non-Latin characters in their national languages at a disadvantage. Use of
local languages in the addressing system is also a crucial element to bring nations with languages
not based on the ASCII code into the Internet more efficiently.
Technical experiments with internationalized domain names started in the 1990s, mainly within the
Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-governmental Internet standardization body of technicians
and engineers. After 2000, ICANN started a special program to implement international domain
names, both at the secondary and the primary (top) levels (iDN.iDN). 43 But while internationalized
domain names on the secondary domain level were introduced in 2004, their introduction on the
top level created unexpected technical and political problems.
Some experts, like Jon Klensin of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the umbrella organization
of the Internet Engineering Task Force, pointed to the enormous challenge for the capacity of
routers if they must deal with different language tables with hundreds of non-ASCII characters. He
warned of “cosmic confusion” and a collapse of the domain name system. But ICANN`s so-called
JCK (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) working group concluded that the technical problems related to
language tables in scripts with symbols instead of Latin letters could be managed.
Next to the technical problems, the issue of “ownership of a language” became a political issue.
Established generic top-level domain registries like VeriSign, the registry for .com or .net, argued
that their gTLD may be considered a trademark that should have protection in all language
variations, including Chinese. Alternatively, China's representatives argued that the Chinese
language is owned by the Chinese people.
Regardless of numerous workshops, studies and working groups, implementation within ICANN did
not move forward at high speed. China was dissatisfied with the slow progress in ICANN and
developed its own system. In March 2006, the China Internet Network Information Center tested
internationalized domain names on the top-level domain system, so-called “Chinese domain
names.” 44 The first test was limited to .cn, .net and .com with Chinese characters.
The Network Information Center established its own root server system to manage communication
amongst the new top-level domains. Linkage to the global legacy root server system was
guaranteed by a special procedure that added automatically in each query, the ASCII-based .cn
top-level domain to an iDN.iDN address. This was not visible for the user in the Chinese mainland,
and it only created problems for Chinese users outside of China if they forgot to add the .cn in
ASCII to the e-mail or web-address with Chinese characters. Reports on the results of this test
were not available at this writing.

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Separate language-based Internet root server systems have the potential to split the Internet. It
can lead to fragmentation of the global unified Internet. Such a split - some people call it the
“Balkanization of the Internet” - would not end the Internet as we know it but would lead to new
complications and challenges for coordination. To maintain the standard of universal
communication, bridges would need to be built between different language-based networks, with
very complex cooperation mechanisms.
From an economic and technical viewpoint, such fragmentation would be very counter-productive.
There would be disintegration of the unique value of the Internet, with its current 1.3 billion users
who can all communicate with each other anywhere, any time. Changing root server systems
when moving from one language to another would create additional technical problems and lead
to inefficient time-consuming and costly bureaucratic procedures.
Separate roots could lead also to more control opportunities over the communication flow within a
specific language root, particularly if all root servers of such a network are on the territory of a
single country. Bridges between language-based networks could be designed as gateways that
could be passed only with special governmental permission. That could backfire against the social
and economic needs of a society and lead to isolation and backwardness.
To avoid such a trend toward fragmentation, ICANN has speeded up its procedures and started in
2007 a so-called “fast track” for introduction of iDN.iDN on the country code top level for 11 non-
ASCII language scripts, including complex and simplified Chinese. 45 ICANN Chairman Peter
Dengath Trush, on a visit to Beijing in February 2008, gave assurances that the fast track would
be really fast.
Part of this project is to offer China the possibility of a .cn top-level domain with Chinese
characters in the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority data base and in the legacy root server
system. China has welcomed ICANN's fast track proposal since there is a strong economic
incentive to remain within the global legacy root. But it remains to be seen how potential
contradictions between China's economic interests and its political interests are worked out and
how the use of Chinese characters in the top-level domain zone files will finally make its way into
the legacy root server system coordinated by ICANN.
At an ICANN meeting in Los Angeles in October 2007, another problem appeared when
representatives of China's Network Information Center challenged use of both traditional and
modernized Chinese on an equal basis in ICANN’s test phase. On the mainland, modernized
Chinese dominates and in Taiwan traditional Chinese script is more popular.
IPv6 addresses
The issue of the new addressing system - IPv6 - is of similar complexity. It is expected that the old
version of the Internet protocol - IPv4 - will reach its limits and be saturated in 2012. ICANN has
dealt with the Internet protocol issue for several years through its Address Supporting
Organization, in close cooperation with the Regional Internet
Registries and the Number Resource Organization
China has its own National Internet Registry. Chinese Internet service providers can get Internet
protocol addresses both from the National Internet Registry and the Asian-Pacific Regional
Internet Registry. Chinese officials argue that they do not have enough IPv4 address blocks. But
transition to IPv6, which offers a rather unlimited number of addresses, also creates a number of
technical and political problems, still being discussed.

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One technical problem is the interoperability between the two protocols. Existing protocols allow
interoperability only from IPv4 to IPv6 and not the other way around - presenting another risk that
the Internet could be split into two networks.
Further, with introduction of IPv6, the established procedure of a flexible allocation of Internet
protocol addresses following specific ongoing communication needs could end and be replaced by
a procedure that would give every individual or institutional Internet user an Internet protocol
address for life. Like passport numbers, such fixed addresses could become a key element in
Internet authentication processes. That would raise many questions about data protection, privacy
and human rights. It would also open up possibilities for much more control of individual Internet
communications.
Conclusions
China will soon be the Internet's No. 1 nation, surpassing the United States as the country with the
largest number of users, as well as the largest number of domain name registrations under a
country code top-level domain, and the largest number of broadband access points. It will also
have the largest number of individual web sites and blogs.
However, Internet development in China is characterized by a huge contradiction between
economic interests and human rights practices. While there is an open policy toward promotion of
the private sector in the Internet economy, including access for everybody to the Internet, there is
also a restrictive government policy when it comes to access to and distribution of information or
free communication amongst individual Internet users. It remains to be seen what the
consequences of that contradiction will be for China’s internal evolution and for its relations with
the world outside China.
Wolfgang Kleinwächter is a professor of Internet policy and regulation in the Department for Media
& Information Studies at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He is Co-Chair of the law section of
the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), co-founder of the
Global Internet Governance Academic Network and was a member of the UN Working Group on
Internet Governance.
5 1 On the 20th anniversary of the first e-mail from China, the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany
organized with the Chinese Academy of Science a conference on Internet issues with high-level representation from
China, Germany and the United States, including Zorn, Landweber and Wolff. http://www.hpi.unipotsdam.de/fileadmin/hpi/veranstaltungen/china/slides/conference_binder.pdf
6 1 See ISO Maintenance Agency, in: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes
7 1 See CNNIC, 21st Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development in China, January 2008, in:
http://www.cnnic.cn/uploadfiles/pdf/2008/2/29/104126.pdf
8 1 Art. 27 of the China lnternet Domain Name Regulations, Order No. 30, Ministry of Information Industry of the
People's Republic of China, Sept. 28, 2004, see: http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2005/03/24/2861.htm
9 1 CNNIC Implementing Rules of Domain Name Registration, Dec. 1, 2002, in:
http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2003/11/27/1522.htm
10 1 Rules for CNNIC Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, Oct. 8, 2007, in:
http://www/cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2006/03/15/3655.htm
11 1 ICANN Board Chairman visits CNNIC, Feb. 19, 2008, in:
http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2008/02/25/4995.htm
12 1 https://www.hkdnr.hk/
13 1 http://www.monic.net.mo/page.php
14 1 http://www.twnic.net.tw/index2.php
15 1 CNNIC, 21st Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development, in China, January 2008, p. 25, ibid.
16 1 ibid, p. 41 ff.

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17 1 Chinese Eye Tracking Study: Baidu vs. Google, http://www.searchengineland.com
18 1 China's Internet economy grows faster than Western countries; People’s Daily Online, Feb. 17, 2007,
in: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200702/16/eng20070216_350659.html
19 1 See Pacific Telecommunication Conference (PTC), Honolulu, January 2007, in:
http://www.ptc07.org/program/prog_schedule.html
20 1 Kai LI Kan, An Analysis of Various Models for Wireless Cities, in: Wolfgang Kleinwächter (ed,), The Power of
Ideas: Internet Governance in a Global Multistakeholder Environment, Berlin 2007, p. 130 ff.
21 1 See Access to Knowledge Conference, New Haven Yale Information Society Project, April 27-29, 2007,
in:http://research.yale.edu/isp/eventsa2k2.html
22 1 21st CNNIC Report, p. 42 ff. ibid
23 1 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1982), Art. 35, in:
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html
24 1 Art. 40, ibid.
25 1 Art. 41, ibid.
26 1 In a speech, Jan. 17, 2008, Yan Xlaohong, Vice Minister of the General Administration of Press and
Publication (GAPP) recalled: [Communist Party] “Secretary General Hu Jinmo pointed out whether we can cope with the
Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the
state. To protect intellectual property rights by combatting Internet piracy is an important measure to strengthen the
administration of Internet culture and a guarantee for its healthy development. Copyright administrative departments will,
just as usual, cooperate with public security departments and communication administrative departments to crack down
on Internet piracy resolutely and severely, so as to make active contributions to maintaining the order of Internet
communication, developing harmonious Internet culture and promoting the advancement of Internet Industry."
http://www.china.org.cn/e-news/news080117-1.htm
27 1 see Freedom of Expression and the Internet in China: A Human Rights Watch Backgrounder,
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/china-bck-0701.htm
28 1 see Wikipedia, Internet Censorship in the People's Republic of China,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
29 1 Internet cafes and other service providers also give users special guidelines for "behavior in good faith."
www.sohu.com informs their customers: "Please take note that the following issues are prohibited according to Chinese
law: 1. Criticism of the PRC Constitution; 2. Revealing State secrets and discussion about overthrowing the Communist
government; 3. Topics that damage the reputation of the State; 4. Discussions that ignite ethnic animosity, discrimination
or regional separatism; 5, Discussion that undermines the State's religious policy, as well as promotes evil cults and
superstition; 6. Spreading rumors, perpetrating and disseminating false news that promotes disorder and social
instability; 7. Dissemination of obscenity, sex, gambling, violence, and terror. Cyber-sex is not permitted within the
English chat-room; 8. Humiliating or slandering innocent people: 9. Any discussion and promotion of content which PRC
laws prohibit. If you are a Chinese national and willingly choose to break these laws, Sohu.com is legally obliged to
report you to the Public Security Bureau. Thank you for your cooperation." http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/chinabck-0701.htm
30 1 A detailed study was done by Benjamin Edelman of the Berkman Center, Internet Filtering in China in 2004-
2005: A Country Study. The study concludes that "China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its
kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and
effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and
thousands of public and private personnel. It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, Including web
pages, web logs, online discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. Our testing found
efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent.
In: http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/
31 1 China's 'Eye on the Internet' a Fraud, http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/chinas-eye-internetfraud-14190.html
32 1 Clive Thompson, Google's China Problem (or China's Google Problem), in: New York Times, April 23, 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html?pagewanted=all
33 1 see Freedom of the Press Worldwide in 2006, Annual Report of Reporters Without Borders, p.80 ff, in:
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/rapport_en_bd-4.pdf
34 1 Declan McCullagh, Congressman quizzes Net companies on shame, CNET News, Feb. 15, 2006, in:
http://www.news.com/Congressman-quizzes-Net-companies-on-shame/2100-1028_3-
6040250.html
35 1 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Dec. 12, 1948, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

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36 1 IAMCR Annual Meeting, Paris 2007. Law Section, session III: Promoting Media Freedoms Worldwide: Case
studies, July 24, 2007, http://www.iamcrparis2007.org/details.html?p=4&k=&type=0&date=&site=&theme=#
37 1 Clive Thompson, Google's China Problem (or China's Google Problem), in: New York Times, April 23, 2006, ibid
38 1 UN Working Group on Internet Governance, http://www.wgig.org/members.html
39 1 WSIS Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, Nov. 18, 2005,
http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/tunis/off/8rev1.doc
40 1 Paragraph 63, ibid
41 1 Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Internet Governance and Governments: Enhanced Cooperation or Enhanced
Confrontation? in: Communications Law, Journal of Computer, Media and Telecommunications Law, Vol. 12, No. 4,
2007, Tottel Publishing, London, pp. 111-118.
See also: Wolfgang Kleinwächter: From Self-Governance to Public Private Partnership: The Changing Role of
Governments in the Management of the Internet's Core Resources, in: Loyola Law Review of Los Angeles, Vol, 36, No.3,
Spring 2003, http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue3/kleinwaechter.pdf
Wolfgang Kleinwächter. The Silent Subversive: ICANN and the New Global Governance, in Info: The Journal of Policy,
Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunication. Vol. 3, No.4, Fall 2001.
Wolfgang Kleinwächter: ICANN between Technical Mandate and Political Challenge, in: Telecommunication Policy,
Vol. 24, London.
Wolfgang Kleinwächter, The History of Internet Governance, in C. Möller & A. Amouroux (Eds.), Governing the Internet,
Vienna, 41-90 (2007).
42 1 The Global Culture of Cybersecurity, workshop at the 2nd Internet Governance Forum, Rio de Janeiro,
Nov. 13, 2007, http://www.intgovforum.org/
43 1 The first ICANN workshop took place In November 2000, http://www.icann.org/announcements/icann -
pr03nov00.htm
44 1 http://www.icann.org/announcements/icann-pr03nov00.htm
45 1 My Name, My Language, My Internet iDN Test Goes Live, Oct. 15, 2007;
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-15oct07.htm.
See also the discussion draft of the initial report of the iDNC workinggroup (iDNC WG), Feb. 1, 2008,
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-01feb08.htm

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Conference speakers and moderators :
Oystein Alme
Director, Foundation Voice of Tibet
He has been the director of the Voice of Tibet (VOT) radio from its start in 1996. It has
been targeted from the start by systematic blocking from China against all its means of
dissemination: short wave radio, satellite transmissions and the Internet. VOT strives to
produce unbiased news and information on Tibet-related issues to Tibet and China, in
both Tibetan and Mandarin.
Timothy Balding
Chief Executive Officer, World Association of Newspapers
Timothy Balding was named Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of
Newspapers, the global trade organization for the press industry, in November 2005. He
had been its Director General since 1987, after joining WAN as Deputy director and editor
of its magazine in 1985. Earlier, he worked for newspapers in Britain, including the Oxford
Mail, and was a political correspondent for the Press Association.
Jean-Philippe Béja
Senior Research Fellow, International Relations Studies Center (CERI), Political Studies
Institute (IEP-Sciences-Po), Paris
Former scientific director of the Centre d'Etudes Français sur la Chine Contemporaine in
Hong Kong, Béja is a CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) Senior
Research Fellow. He was from 1993-1997 chief editor of the journals China Perspectives
and Perspectives Chinoises. He specializes in contemporary Chinese politics. Recent
publications include A la rechèrche d'une ombre chinoise, Seuil, 2004, on China's prodemocracy
movement.
Robert O. Boorstin
Corporate & Policy Communications Director, Google, Washington, DC
Robert Boorstin helps design and implement Google's strategies on a wide range of policy
issues. He served more than seven years in the Clinton Administration, including as the
President's chief speech writer at the National Security Council and as senior advisor to
Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Boorstin
began his career as a reporter at The New York Times.
Vincent Brossel
Head, Asia Desk, Reporters Sans Frontières
He has been in that post since 2000. He has conducted on-the-spot investigations and
production of reports on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, China, Korea, Nepal, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, Thailand and Tibet, and coordinated tRSFs research and other work in Asia.

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Ronald J. Deibert
Director, The Citizen Lab, Munk Center for International Studies, University of Toronto
Deibert is Associate Professor of political science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the
Munk Center for International Studies, University of Toronto - an interdisciplinary research
and development center on the Internet and human rights. He is a co-founder and a
principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, a research/advocacy project on Internet
censorship and surveillance worldwide, and director of the Psiphon censorshipcircumvention
software project. He has published numerous articles and two books on
issues related to technology, media and world politics
Bob Dietz
Asia Program Coordinator, Committee to Protect Journalists
Since 1977, Dietz has worked as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the
United States. In 1995, he moved to Hong Kong, where he spent seven years as a senior
editor at Asiaweek. He later joined the World Health Organization, handling media
relations and risk communication during the SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. At CPJ,
he continues to report widely in Asia.
Kathryn Dovey
Program Manager, Business Leaders’ Initiative on Human Rights
She has worked in various capacities in the field of business and human rights since 2004.
Dovey was previously a legal officer and international tax advisor. In 2003, she obtained a
masters degree in international human rights law from McGill University, Montreal. She is
based in Paris, where she manages the BLIHR office.
Fan Ho-Tsai
Chairperson, Hong Kong Journalists Association
Miss Fan has more than 20 years' journalism experience, in print, radio and TV news. She
has worked for the Hong Kong Economic Times, Commercial Radio, and Asia Television.
Her last full-time job was as news editor of Hong Kong Broadband Network, a 24-hour pay
television station, where she ran daily newsroom operations. She became a freelancer in
2006, to allow her time to study at Hong Kong Baptist University for an MA in international
journalism studies.
Jocelyn Ford
Chair, Media Freedoms Committee, Foreign Correspondents Club of China
A Beijing-based freelance correspondent, Ford challenged self-censorship in Japan in the
late 1980s, when she worked for Kyodo News Service and became the first foreign
reporter assigned to the Japanese prime minister's press corps. She later became Tokyo
bureau chief for US National Public Radio's premier business show, Marketplace. In 2001,
she joined state-run China Radio International, where her program, Realtime Beijing,
worked to overcome censorship rules and to broadcast accurate, balanced news. In 2002,
Ford rejoined Marketplace, opening its Beijing bureau.

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Gao Yu
Freelancer, Winner of WAN's Golden Pen of Freedom,
1st UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize laureate
She is well-known as a columnist both in the Chinese-language press of Hong Kong and in
the United States. In 1988, she became assistant editor of a weekly economic review and
was arrested and jailed for 15 months for her coverage of the 1989 Beijing democracy
movement. On Oct. 2, 1993, two days before a planned visit to Columbia University, she
was rearrested and given a six-year sentence for “revealing state secrets.” The World
Association of Newspapers awarded her its Golden Pen of Freedom in 1995, and in 1997,
she was the first winner of UNESCO's annual World Press Freedom Prize.
Agnès Gaudu
China editor, Courrier International magazine
She has a MPhil in Chinese studies and spent two years on an exchange scholarship in
China (1979-1981). She worked at Agence France Presse and Reuters before freelancing,
reporting from China throughout the 1980s. In September 1989, she published a book
(Ramsay) on the social effects of China’s “open door” economic policy. In 1997, she
became China editor of the Paris weekly Courrier International, where she is in charge of
selecting and editing materials from the Chinese press to illuminate current issues. In
2005, she conceived and directed a 116-page special issue, La Chine des Chinois: De
Tian'anmen aux JO de Pékin (The China of the Chinese: From Tiananmen to the Beijing
Olympics), devoted to change in China over 10 years.
Merle Goldman
Professor of History Emerita, Boston University
She has a PhD in History and Far Eastern Languages, Harvard University (1964). She is a
Research Associate at the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard.
She has been an Adjunct Professor at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute
since 1998. She has published numerous books, including From Comrade to Citizen: The
Struggle for Political Rights in China, Harvard Press 2005, paperback 2007; Sowing the
Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era, Harvard Press,
1994; China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent, Harvard Press 1981, paperback 1987;
Literary Dissent in Communist China, Harvard Press 1967, Atheneum paperback 1970; and
China: A New History, Enlarged Edition, co-authored with John K. Fairbank, Belknap Press
1998, updated 2006. She has been editor or co-editor of eight other books on China and
written more than 70 articles in scholarly journals and in The New York Review of Books,
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New Republic and elsewhere.
Guo Guoting (Thomas),
Maritime and human rights lawyer
He has 21 years of experience as a maritime lawyer and four years as a human rights
lawyer. He has also taught law and has published 10 books on law and 500 essays and
case studies. He is currently studying for an LLM degree at the University of Victoria,
British Columbia. He earned an LLB in international law in 1984 from Jilin University,
Changchun, China. From 2002-2005, he was managing partner of the Shanghai Tian-yee
Law Group, focusing on human rights cases involving dissidents and Falun Gong members.
He has written extensively on maritime law.

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Sharon K. Hom
Executive Director, Human Rights in China
Professor of Law Emerita of City University of New York's School of Law, Hom has more
than 16 years' experience in Sino-American law training and legal exchanges, including as
a faculty member and director of the China Center for American Law Study in China, and
on the US-China Committee on Legal Education Exchange with China (1990- 2000). She
also served as teaching faculty and program director of the US Clinical Legal Education
Workshop at Tsinghua University Law School in Beijing (June 2000). She has published
extensively on Chinese legal reform, trade, technology and human rights.
Huang Xiaolu
Expert on China's environmental issues
She created the Huang Wanli Study Fund in Washington DC, in honor of her late father, a
distinguished Chinese professor of water engineering who campaigned against the
ecological disasters that he predicted would ensue from China’s major dam-building
projects. He was publicly attacked, isolated, jailed and sentenced to hard labor over his
opposition in the 1950s to the Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River. Huang has continued
her father's campaign against mega-projects such as the Three Gorges Dam that risk
upsetting the environmental balance.
Alberto Ibargüen
President, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
He is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of its Spanish-language sister
publication, El Nuevo Herald. During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer
Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain's Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.
After law school and service in the Peace Corps in Venezuela and Colombia, he practiced
law in Hartford, Conn. until joining The Hartford Courant, and later Newsday in Long
Island NY before moving to Miami. He was formerly Chairman of the Board of the Public
Broadcasting Service in the United States and is now Chairman of the Board of the
Newseum in Washington DC, a museum for free speech and free press.
Libby Liu
President, Radio Free Asia
Named President in September 2005, Liu is responsible for execution of RFA’s mission to
provide balanced, objective news to listeners in Asia where such news is unavailable. She
was RFA Vice President for administration and finance 2003-2005. Before, she was
Director of Administration & Strategic Planning of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People. She was earlier Director of Human Resources with San
Jose, California high-tech firm Spyrus Inc. and Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco,
prosecuting narcotics trafficking, armed robbery and domestic violence. Earlier positions in
private law practice at San Francisco and New York firms focused on labor law. A native
Californian, she is the daughter of Chinese immigrants.

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Watson Meng
Founder and Editor, Boxun News
Boxun is the first (2000) and most popular Chinese on-line news site (boxun.com) based
on citizen journalism. Meng's previous positions include commercial manager at Unilever,
Zhangjiakou, China, and accountant and project manager at Motorola, Tianjin, China. He
holds an MBA from Duke University, an MA in economics from Nankai University, China,
and a BA in electronic engineering from Hebei Technology Institute, China. He has served
as a technical consultant for Human Rights Watch’s Chinese web site and for Human
Rights in China’s web project.
Julien Pain
Editorial Director, the “Observers” web site, France 24 TV
The site directed by Pain (www.observers.france24.com) is dedicated to viewer-submitted
materials, such as photos and amateur videos, subjected to professional editing. He
worked at Reporters Sans Frontières 2003-2007 as head of its Internet Freedom Desk,
devoted to monitoring and lobbying against Internet censorship and supporting cyberdissidents.
He edited a widely translated Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.
Peter Scheer
Executive Director, California First Amendment Coalition
A lawyer and journalist, Peter Scheer has since mid-2004 headed the California First
Amendment Coalition, a public interest group to advance free speech, open and
accountable government, and public participation in civic affairs. Since its founding in
1988, the coalition has worked against government censorship and excessive secrecy. The
coalition organized legal defense of wikileaks.org, a whistle-blower web site silenced by a
US Federal judge's order in early 2008. The coalition has also initiated a challenge to
Chinese Internet censorship, as a violation of its international treaty commitments under
the World Trade Organization. The coalition is the lead plaintiff in a test case on public
access to government data bases. Scheer has argued before the US Supreme Court. He
was publisher of Legal Times, a Washington DC weekly on law and lobbying.
Paul E. Steiger
Editor-in-Chief, President, Pro Publica
Created in January 2008, Pro Publica is a non-profit, non-partisan group doing
investigative journalism in the public interest. He was for 16 years Managing Editor of The
Wall Street Journal. He was on the Pulitzer Prize Board 1998-2007 and its Chairman in his
final year. Steiger is also the Chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists and a
trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Per Toien
Chief of Information, Norwegian Olympic and Para-Olympic Committee
& Sports Confederation
He is a senior adviser on sports policy at the Confederation and has been a teacher,
journalist and public relations advisor. He directed sports programs in Zambia and
Zimbabwe. He was head coach of Norway’s basketball team.

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Greg Walton
Asia Editor, Infowar Monitor
He does research on information warfare and cyber-espionage (www.infowarmonitor.net/).
He has worked as a research consultant for a number of NGOs, including
Human Rights in China. His research focuses on the export of surveillance technology to
China, and its impact on social movements. He has also helped develop Internet
circumvention technologies. He has worked as a journalist in India, covering the Tibetan
exile community.
Alain Wang
Director, Asia Presse; Editor, Asia Magazine
A Sinologist, Wang is the chief editor of Asia Magazine, the only French-language news
magazine devoted to Asian affairs. He has since 2003 been Secretary General of Asia
Presse, the association of French journalists covering Asia, and is a founder of the Centre
d'accueil de la presse étrangère (CAPE), the foreign press welcome center in Paris.
Jon Williams
BBC World News Editor
He leads reporting teams in 41 bureaus worldwide, working for the BBC's domestic and
international news services, on radio, television and on-line. As UK news editor, he won a
Royal Television Society award for the BBC's reporting of the July 7 bomb attacks on
London. He was previously deputy editor of Britain's most watched television news
program, The Six o'clock News, during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 9/11
attacks on the United States. In September 2007, he won an International Emmy Award
for the BBC's coverage of the war in Lebanon.
Steve Wilson
European Sports Editor, Associated Press, London
A Washington DC native, he has worked in AP bureaus in Boston, Miami, New York, New
Delhi, Rome and London. He has covered 10 summer and winter Olympic Games and has
covered the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic movement since 1991. He
is a member of the IOC’s Press Commission.
Richard N. Winfield
Chairman, World Press Freedom Committee
He served for more than 30 years as General Counsel of the Associated Press and
defended AP and other media clients in many hundreds of press freedom cases. Since
2002, he has taught courses in comparative mass media law and American mass media
and Internet law at Columbia Law School and Fordham Law School in New York. He leads
the media law reform programs of International Senior Lawyers Project, which he cofounded
in 2000. He has been Chairman of WPFC since 2006.

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Yuwen Wu
News and Current Affairs Editor, BBC Chinese Service
Born in China, she was educated in China, Britain and Canada. She has been at the BBC
World Service since 1995 and is now in charge of news and current affairs output of the
BBC's Chinese Service. She has written and spoken extensively on Chinese affairs,
especially on the situation of the news media in China.
Henrikas Yushkiavitshus
Independent media consultant, Paris
Born in Lithuania, he was director of the Technical Center of the International Radio and
Television Organization, Intervision, in Prague. From 1971 to 1990, he was Vice Chairman
of the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting (Gostelradio). From
1990 to 2001, he was UNESCO's Assistant Director General for Communication and
continues to advise UNESCO’s Director General. He participated in preparing and
implementing broadcast coverage of Olympic Games, starting in 1968, and organized
media coverage arrangements for the Moscow Olympics in 1981.
Zhang Yu
Coordinator, Independent Chinese PEN Center of International PEN
Born in Wuhan, China, he resides in Sweden. He graduated 1977 in chemical engineering
from Wuhan Institute of Chemical Technology, and taught there from 1977 to 1981. He
became a research assistant in the department of inorganic chemistry, Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH) in Stockholm in 1982, and was awarded a PhD there in 1987, before
serving as research and senior scientist from 1988-2005. Since 2003, he has been
Coordinator of the Writers in Prison Committee of the Independent Chinese PEN Center in
Stockholm. Since 2000, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the monthly magazine Nordic
Chinese Communication. He has also been active in the Swedish Section of Amnesty
International and the Federation for a Democratic China - activities that have led to his
banning from travel to his home country.

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Links to the conference sponsors :
Committee to Protect Journalists home page:http://www.cpj.org/
China-related pages:
http://www.cpj.org/regions_08/asia_08/asia_08.html#china
http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2007/Falling_Short/China/index.html
http://www.cpj.org/regions_08/asia_08/testimony_china_27feb08.html
Human Rights in China home page: http://www.hrichina.org (English)
http://www.zhongguorenquan.org (Chinese)
HRIC's Incorporating Responsibility 2008 Olympics Take Action Campaign:
http://www.ir2008.org
"2008 and Beyond" - The Olympics issue of our journal China Rights Forum:
http://www.hrichina.org/public/contents/45071
Reporters Without Borders home page: http://www.rsf.org
China-related pages:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=25233
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=174
http://www.rsf-chinese.org/spip.php?rubrique18
World Association of Newspapers hom epage: http://www.wan-press.org/
China-related pages:
http://www.wan-press.org/china/home.php
http://www.worldpressfreedomday.org/
World Press Freedom Committee hompage: http://www.wpfc.org/
Interesting Times, WPFC China news blog: http://wpfc.org/blogs/chinablog.html
Links to the speakers’ organizations :
John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~fairbank/
Associated Press http://www.ap.org/
BBC Chinese Service http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/default.stm
BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Boxun News http://boxun.us/news/publish/
http://www.boxun.com/

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California First Amendment Coalition http://www.cfac.org/content/index.php
Courrier International
http://www.courrierinternational.com/gabarits/html/default_online.asp
Foreign Correspondents Club of China http://www.fccchina.org/
France 24 TV's web site, "Observers" www.observers.france24.com
Google http://www.google.fr/intl/fr/corporate/
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html
Hong Kong Journalists Association
http://www.hkja.org.hk/portal/Site.aspx?lang=en-US&id=H1-190
Independent Chinese PEN Centre
http://www.penchinese.net/en/wipc/yangjianli.htm
http://www.chinesepen.org/Index.shtml
Open Flows http://openflows.com/
OpenNet Initiative http://opennet.net/
Radio Free Asia http://www.rfa.org/english/
Voice of Tibet http://www.vot.org/
Links to other organizations :
Amnesty International home page: http://www.amnesty.org/en
China-related page: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/china
China Digital Times home page: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/
Olympics-related page: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/cat/focus/beijing-olympics-
2008/
Human Rights Watch home page: http://www.hrw.org/
China-related page: http://china.hrw.org/
International Federation of Journalists home page: http://www.ifj.org/
International Olympic Committee
http://www.olympic.org/uk/organisation/ioc/index_uk.asp

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International Press Institute home page: http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/
International Publishers Association
Home page: http://www.internationalpublishers.org/
PEN International home page: http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/
China-related pages:
http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/index.php?pid=33&aid=753&return=33
http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/index.php?pid=33&aid=740&return=33
http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/index.php?pid=33&aid=731&return=33
http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1527