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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 68 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,
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 69 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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