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

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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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.