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

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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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