Chinese Journalists Beat Censorship With Web

chris-chittleborough writes "When Beijing tried to make a journalist's pay at one newspaper depend on official reactions to their stories, a web-savvy reporter was able to create a groundswell of public opinion and reverse the move." From the article: "Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials. No one told the editor in chief. For 90 minutes, he ran the meeting, oblivious to the political storm that was brewing. Then Li announced what he had done."

This is china, you think he cant be tried?

[plasmacutter]

It's not the us where they can just rag on their leaders and thumb their nose without cosequence, as much as i'd love it to be otherwise. What's to stop the party from taking revenge or setting an example by making him "disappear"? I'm concerned for this guy.

im sure he'll be treated fairly now

[Anonymous Coward]

actually i predict he'll go mysteriously "missing" next week.....

Re:This is china, you think he cant be tried?

[i_ate_god]

well, to be fair, in the US you just get sued and ruined financially.

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The fall of the CPC?

[ndogg]

I've been noticing a lot of press on China lately, and it seems that reporters are taking braver actions than before. Do these events portend the fall of the China Communist Party? Will the CPC fall from within? If it does, that would be a wonderful tribute to the strength of human will, especially considering that the Iron Curtain required external help.

When is a crackdown - a crackdown?

[digitaldc]

The party's propaganda department had targeted Freezing Point in its media crackdown because it often published investigative reports that embarrassed officials, as well as essays on history, society and current events that challenged the party line.

It surprises me that they didn't just call the cops to come in there, arrest everyone and shut the whole thing down.

Or just lock the doors to the place and tell everyone to stay home and do some censored blogging.

Re:China bashing month

[GenKreton]

True events can hardly be described as bashing.

I agree we should also take notice of other countries transgressions but that doesn't mean we can ignore major stories in other countries because their quota for the month has been met.

Re:Freedom fighters

[Pantero Blanco]

Totalitarian regimes always fall. As things get worse and worse, more and more people are negatively impacted, and as a result, more and more people start taking things seriously. Even if they're ignorant and don't really understand what's going on, most people wake up when they realize things are "majorly sucking". Even if they don't know exactly who to blame and haven't really thought it through, they know that they're angry and that, somehow, the people "in control" must be at fault. Eventually there are too many for the oppressors to beat down, no matter what technological advantages they may have.

It's an endless dance. The cycle of tyranny, rebellion, liberty, and decadence will probably continue until the end of time.

Re:China bashing month

[ShimmyShimmy]

What is this, China bashing month?
-- yeah, and they deserve it

how about posting about those too?
-- you see all those little columns on the left, like 'Apple', 'Hardware', 'Science'? Knock yourself out.

I'm critical of China
-- does not appear so

good bye old red

[freg]

The old ways of China are falling right before our eyes. The question is will this great nation degress into civil war or will enough of this young free-thinking generation pull together and peacefully take the reigns from the old guard. If the latter happens America may be left wondering where its world dominance went so quickly. I don't know enough about China's political situation to guess which route they will take though.

Freedom Fighters

[Doc Ruby]

In China journalists brave jail and execution for independence. In America journalists are afraid to ask politicians questions about their crimes.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

Re:In the US, you're fingered as a terrorist.

[Pantero Blanco]

That's when you write a book and spend the next several years of your life giving speeches at Universities (like Mitnick, Poulson, etc). Being a victim in the United States can be great for your career as long as it doesn't kill you.

Dead in five years :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

He'll be left alone until the West forgets, which will happen within a year or two, five at most.

Then he'll quietly 'retire', or 'fall into ill health', or 'go to stay with a loving relative', and no one will ever hear from him again.

It's a shame. He was a very brave man. The best we can do to honour his memory is to keep the media spotlight on the issues he will no doubt end up giving his life for. :-(

It might not happen. Nelson Mandella survived. Change is possible.
--
AC

Speed of Propogation

[Billosaur]

The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li's memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e-mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China's most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.

The government's Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief's plan to muzzle his reporters.

This is a perfect example of both the promise and the peril of the Internet. The fact is Li, but moving quickly and quietly, was able to get his story out on the Web and probably global during the span of a 90-minute meeting. It took two days for the Communist Party in China to realize that the information had travelled beyong their reach and they had no choice but to back down.

It would be interesting to know the speed of propogation of any piece of information on the Internet, in other words, given that a piece of information is placed somewhere (blog, news site, etc.), how long would it take that piece of information to travel globally? I suppose you could figure out a rough approximation by how many times the information is linked to and from where. But even with no hard data, it goes to show that any information, reliable (in this case) or erroneous (possibly) can travel so far afield that authorities can do little to stop it without advanced warning.

pretty cool.

[Phybersyk0]

If you RTFA it's pretty cool. Li attacks the Communist Party with real communism. Whodathunk?

The core of these regulations is that the standards for appraising the performance of the newspapers will not be on the basis of the media role according to Marxism. It is not based upon the basic principles of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not based upon the spirit of President Hu Jintao about how power, rights and sentiments should be tied to the people. It is not based upon whether the masses of readers will be satisfied. Instead, the appraisal standard will depend upon whether a small number of senior organizations or officials like it or not.

Re:China bashing month

[liangzai]

No, this is pure China bashing. There's nothing new in what is reported, just new iterations of the same stuff, and it is the same China-illiterate crowd that howls "Communists!" as always.

There are other stories that could have been discussed, like Swedish security police and state department shutting down a political party's web site for showing a picture of Muhammed (Sweden is supposedly a democracy), like Austria sentencing a British author to three years in prison for having non-conformant views (Austria is supposedly a democracy), like the EU deciding to store Internet traffic, like the dissolution of the freedom of the press (and speech) in Europe and other parts of the Western world after Islamist extremists threatened with violence.

These questions are so much more important at this moment than what is happening in a dictatorship on its slow march to civilized society and democracy.

Article misses point

[Ulf667]

Li Datong and his deputy were still fired, and as Li was the editorial heart of the China Youth Daily, even if the policy was not applied, censorship still won the day.

This seems more of a loss than a victory to me.

Re:China bashing month

[Anonymous Coward]

The media overreporting the same kind of true events over and over can be.

What is "overreporting" in this context? These aren't trivial events like a presidential blowjob, or Y2K, or an MP caught doing naughty things with a doberman. These are pertinent issues. The Chinese represent what, a sixth of humanity? I'd say that news reports about their political situation, good or bad, are more important than most.

Re:Freedom fighters

[fritsd]

You said:

all of these were reversed and undone within a few months of the end of those respective wars,

so... after "Terrorism" has surrendered in this current "War", legislation that curtails the freedoms of americans will probably also be reversed? Oh well, that won't take long..

Re:Freedom fighters

[Starker_Kull]

So when will the War on Terrorism be done? Let me know what the criteria are so I can prod my local bureaucrats into restoring a few freedoms that have been lost this round. Ditto for the War on Drugs, running for decades now, with no clear winners or losers or end.

It is a bit more insidious in modern times, I think...

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Re:Freedom fighters

[Omnifarious]

So, when will "The War on Terrorism®" end? Near as I can tell, the answer to that question is "Never.". That's a pretty gloomy schedule for getting back our freedom. In fact, it's positively Orwellian. Constant war as an excuse for limited freedom.

Re:Article misses point

[dhardisty]

"...in January, propaganda officials finally shut down the section. Before doing so, they called executives from all the major Web sites to a special meeting and warned them not to allow any discussion of the action.

The news spread quickly anyway. "

I'm constantly impressed by the selflessness of Chinese people who risk their job and their freedom for the good of their country.

Re:Freedom fighters

[Irish_Samurai]

They may give back freedoms, but they love to keep the legislation.

I'm still waiting for them to repeal the Income Tax.

which is more insideous?

[SuperBanana]

In China journalists brave jail and execution for independence.

Li didn't seem all that worried about either, to be honest. I think you're romanticizing things a tad.

In America journalists are afraid to ask politicians questions about their crimes.

So, which is more insideous? The blatant "don't go against the groupthink, or we'll kill you"?

Or, the subtle "don't go against the groupthink, because we give nothing useful in a public press conference, and you won't be given the good stuff anymore like your colleagues. You'll be labelled a 'biased liberal', and because nobody in the administration will speak to you, you'll be unemployable"?

Study the White House press core situation, and tell me that isn't censorship in full force. The press secretary refutes any serious question with almost every trick in the logical-fallacy handbook. Unless you play along, you don't get the "government official, speaking on condition of anonymity" or "after the press conference, Scott McClellan said privately..." tidbits. Remember the days when presidents would be the ones speaking at a press conference, not a guy who keeps saying, "The President feels..."?

I recall reading recently how the WH press core got all bent out of shape about getting the news late about Cheney's little shooting incident. Where was the outrage over something that matters, like domestic spying? And if they were truly so angry, why didn't they just all get up and leave?

The White House press core are like crack whores. They rely on yet despise their pimps, occasionally developing some backbone or attitude. But at the end of the day, they're still just puppet addicts.

If the USSR had to do it all over again...

[realmolo]

Why haven't we stopped all diplomatic relations with China? Why haven't we imposed trade sanctions?

Oh, right, China supplies us with cheap manufactured goods, and makes various U.S. companies richer.

Apparently, being a totalitarian, human-rights-suppressing government is *perfectly fine* with the United States as long as you supply us with lots of cheap goods. Oh, and buy up our debt so we can continue our fiscally irresponsible ways.
 

Re:Freedom Fighters

[Doc Ruby]

You mean the Bob Woodward who makes his living off of writing Bush biographies, and covers up his own role in outing CIA/WMD agents?

Isn't this why Google is in China???

[acoustix]

Google knows that censoring the Internet is impossible. China's government still doesn't understand that it's impossible. Li proved that it's impossible. This is one reason why Google needs to succeed in China. The Chinese will use Google to find what they're looking for, regardless of what the Government tries to do. I believe this will slowly lead to the uncensoring of China.

Of course, I could be dead wrong.

-Nick

What China should learn from the US

[RomulusNR]

Clearly China does not do a good enough job of discrediting and ostracizing its critics in the public sphere. And clearly it has not done a good job at making the Chinese people self-centered and aloof from each other.

Play the same scenario in the story out in the US in your head, and imagine what would happen. Major media would ignore it. Mass populace would ignore it, writing it off as crackpottery, bolstered by the lack of media coverage. Most people would delete the message as an "obvious spam" or "liberal bullshit" or some such. Result effect: zero.

The Chinese people actually *care about* and *believe* these sorts of things. That's where the PRC has clearly failed. They have not properly desensitized and disinterested their public. They need a heavy dose of selfishness injected into their population. Then they could get away with an awful lot more.

Screwing US tech and CRM workers with offshoring? Who cares? Screwing the working poor with no benefits? Who cares? Screwing the poor with social service cuts? Who cares? Screwing the economy, international affairs, and budget with a poorly defensible war? Who cares?

Clearly, the Chinese people care far too much.

Re:Freedom fighters

[Stephen Samuel]

There is a slippery slope here, but you're turning it into a vertical cliff. The only censorship advocated by American political parties today is censorship of "obscene material" containing violence, sex, expletives, etc. While I completely agree that this ought to be covered under free speech, let's look at this honestly: this isn't political speech. Alberto Gonzales would like to could get rid of porn not because it's critical of Bush, but out of genuine (from his perspective) concern about "corrupting" children.

You forgot about people who got censured and supressed for complaining about Bush's foray into Iraq "It's unamerican to criticize the president in a time of war".

The thing is that this so-called war isn't like WWII where the start, end and opponents could be clearly deliniated by declarations of war and peace treaties. This 'war on terror' has no specific start date, and not prospective end time. The civil rights that dissapear in the name of 'The War On Terror' are not likely to be recovered anytime in the forseeable future.
"The enemy" is the ephemeral 'terrorist', but terrorism has been so generically defined, at times, that organizing a general strike to signal opposition to an impugned government policy could classify as 'terrorism' and thus get the organizers quietly taken into custody with no notification to anybody (other than a body count a year later) and precious little in the way of civil rights.

"they're terrorists, after all, not citizens.

News organizations and reporters that portray Bush in a negative light are quietly frozen out of briefings, so they learn to be silent unless 'everybody else' is also criticizing him. The result is that public debate is quietly squashed.

Similar things can be said about criticizing large corporations that media organizations rely on for advertising revenue.
I've talked to the photo editor of a large daily who pointed to one of my images as an especially good news photo, "... But we'd never print it", because it would have promoted the viewpoint of the wrong side.
She talked to me of how one well-respected photographer's images couldn't be used because he was 'to biased' (i.e. he was with the anti-logging protestors). That day, her paper back-paged the story of a large local protest against then-current logging practices. A couple of days later, the paper printed on the front page an image that was credited to the logging company that the protests were aimed at. It was an image of a smaller pro-logging rally that the company had orginized in another city.

This is a local example that I was directly involved in, but there are examples elsewhere. Censorship is alive and well and living at a news source near you. It's just not official.. As Li Datong said in TFA: "A newspaper can evaluate reporters that way, and many do, but it can't be so blatant about it."

Re:This is china, you think he cant be tried?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Misworded subject. Should have been "This is china, do you think he needs a trial before being punished?"