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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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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.