STATE SECRETS: CHINA'S LEGAL LABYRINTH - HRIC

Cover-ups
34 HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA STATE SECRETS: CHINA’S LEGAL LABYRINTH
The numerous incidences of enforced media silences and cover-ups that have been
documented 118 have a direct, fundamental impact on the lives of people in China,
and increasingly, globally. 119 Some—including disease outbreaks, environmental
accidents and industrial accidents—are tied explicitly to state secrets. Others may
not have been directly driven by specific state secrets regulations, but all are representative
of government information control, of which state secrets plays an integral
part.
To maintain control over the media, specific regulations on state secrets in the
work of the media have been passed, such as the 1992 Regulation on the Protection
of State Secrets in News Publishing. 120 However, recent regulations released in 2006
governing foreign media, including regulations created specifically for the 2008
Olympics, seemingly contradict both each other and the earlier regulations. In
order to address growing international pressure in the lead-up to the Olympic
Games, the 2006 regulations purportedly relax requirements for journalists working
in China. 121 However, three problems remain: the media regulations still
contain wording that is ambiguous; these regulations remain under the overall
umbrella of the state secrets system, which is dedicated to information control; and
despite reported attempts to relax controls through national regulations, local
authorities still operate independently, as witnessed by continuing harassment of
and violence directed at Chinese journalists investigating stories at local levels. 122
Pollution accidents: The toxic spill in the Songhua River in November 2005 was
only one of many cover-ups of pollution accidents, including cadmium pollution
in the North and Xiang rivers, which prompted the central government to issue
guidelines for the prompt reporting of such incidents in February 2006. 123 Ultimately,
this new reporting structure and the declassification of death tolls from
natural disasters are surgical moves. The NAPSS declined to define “natural disasters”
and warned that only government agencies would be able to release (and collect)
these statistics—signaling that it was not ready to release its hold on
information. And how these guidelines will coordinate with the proposed new
“Draft Law on Emergency Response” now working its way through a reviewing
process remains unclear. But the limited sections of the draft that have been publicly
released to date offer more restrictions on news reporting, not less. 124 The legislation
is reportedly to be issued and made public in 2007. 125