9 May 2012 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
Chinese micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo plan to introduce a “user-contract” in an attempt to control sensitive information on the site. The rules, which are set to be introduced later this month, outline do’s and don’ts for the site, including prohibiting posts which “spread rumors, disrupt social order, and destroy societal stability”. The new rules will also introduce a “community committee”, a group of registered users, who will implement the terms of service. Violation of these regulations could result in deletion, preventing reposting or disabling commenting.
8 May 2012 | China
Al Jazeera English’s China correspondent, Melissa Chan, has been expelled from the People’s Republic after five years in the country.
The TV station’s English arm today announced it has closed its Beijing bureau after the Chinese authorities refused to renew Chan’s press credentials or grant a visa for a replacement correspondent. Chan, a US citizen, is said to be the first reporter in 14 years to be ejected from China.
During Chan’s five years in China she covered a vast range of topics, including environment, foreign policy, economics, social justice and labour rights. She produced several reports on China’s secret “black jails”, and in 2010 was blocked by Chinese authorities from visiting Liu Xia, the wife of jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
It is still not entirely clear what prompted Chan’s expulsion, but according to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China(FCCC), Chinese officials had “expressed anger” at a documentary the channel aired last November. Chan was not involved in the making of Prison Slaves which investigated camps in which prisoners were said to be forced into manual labour.
“They have also expressed unhappiness with the general editorial content on Al Jazeera English and accused Ms Chan of violating rules and regulations that they have not specified,” the FCCC said in a statement on its website.
The group said it was “appalled” by the decision, calling it “the most extreme example of a recent pattern of using journalist visas in an attempt to censor and intimidate foreign correspondents in China”.
Findings from an FCCC survey point to Chan’s expulsion being part of a worrying climate for reporters in the People’s Republic. The group says that:
- Over the past two years 27 foreign reporters were made to wait for more than four months for visa approvals. Thirteen of these had to wait for more than six months and were still waiting at the time of the survey.
- Three requests presented in 2009 had not received a response, which in practice meant they had been denied.
- Twenty eight permanent postings or reporting trips had been cancelled since 2009 because applications for the required journalistic visas were rejected or ignored by the Chinese authorities.
- In six cases foreign reporters say they were told by the Foreign Ministry officials that their bureaux’ visa applications had been rejected or put on hold due to the content of the bureaux’ or the applicant’s previous coverage of Chinese affairs.
Praise for Chan’s work was widespread today. “She served as a voice for the voiceless, often putting herself in dangerous positions to get stories of injustice out in the open,” Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks said in a blogpost today, noting how much of Chan’s reporting focused on local stories rather than those of central government.
“Her removal is an embarrassment, the childish retribution of a government it seems is perpetually more concerned with silencing problems than with solving them,” Custer added.
Evan Osnos of the New Yorker was in agreement, arguing that the move “revives a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine its own efforts to project soft power and shows a spirit of self-delusion that does not bode well for China’s ability to address the problems that imperil its future”.
Mark MacKinnon of the Globe and Mail also highlighted the significance of Chan’s case for Chinese reporters:
This false freedom given to reporters working in China is much more important than Melissa’s case or the careers of any of the foreign correspondents based in China. What’s at stake is not only the outside world’s (already poor) understanding of this rising but paranoid superpower, but also the future of journalism inside China. Chinese journalists have told me that they watch the foreign correspondents with envy, wishing they could report about their own country as freely as we do. Our fight to do our job is intertwined with their fight to do theirs.
Al Jazeera said today that its media network will continue to work with Chinese authorities in order to reopen its Beijing bureau.
“We are committed to our coverage of China. Just as China news services cover the world freely we would expect that same freedom in China for any Al Jazeera journalist,” Salah Negm, director of news at Al Jazeera English, said in a statement.
8 May 2012 | China
The twists and turns in the fate of “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng have held all in its thrall. Despite the vigilance of web censors, China’s netizens — particularly its social media users — have found inventive new ways of discussing the case.
China’s web nannies have been on high alert ever since Chen fled his home in his native Shandong province. To bypass the censors, netizens concocted nicknames for Chen, including “Shawshank” (a reference to the film, The Shawshank Redemption) and “Sunglasses” (denoting Chen’s trademark black sunglasses). But within days, these search terms were also blocked .
Tea Leaf Nation, a blog that “makes sense of China through social meda”, rounded up the memes and graphics that people used to express their support for Chen, including photos of girls on Weibo with “Free CGC” tacked onto their bare legs. The pictures are now likely to be deleted.
Blocking on Sina Weibo (China’s hugely popular version of Twitter) has been systematic in the Chen case. “Chaoyang Hospital” the facility where Chen received treatment, is now an illegal term. When you search for it, Weibo tells you that “according to the relevant regulations, search results cannot be shown.”
The authorities are also using soft blocking – Beijing-based film-maker and writer Charles Custer explored how Weibo hides content from users. For Tech in Asia Custer wrote:
What we found is that while Sina did not block “left of his own volition” as a search term … the company clearly took steps to smother discussion of the term by disabling the indexing of new posts containing the term. … While you can still search for posts with “left of his own volition,” you will only see results from before 16:50 this afternoon, which is approximately when Sina blocked the indexing.
Hong Kong University’s China Media Project, has been, as always, the most reliable source of information on what’s been censored. A post by Xiong Peiyun, a journalist and fellow of the centre, is on the Weibo ban list. Links to Xiong’s piece which criticised China for asking for an apology from the US for sheltering Chen in its embassy have been deleted.
Although overtaken by Chen case, China’s crackdown on “rumour-mongering” in the sensitive Bo Xilai affair continues. On 24 April it was reported that the Chinese government shut down at least four Sina Weibo accounts — “Li Delin,” “Guangzhou Wu Guanchong,” “Yangguang de yuanshi” and “Longyitian—945″ — and several reports claim people running these Weibo handles have disappeared.
The Financial Times report that Wu Guanchong was an entrepreneur and avid internet user based in Guangzhou who allegedly used Weibo to circulate rumors about a coup in Beijing. He has been missing for about a month, it is being claimed he was taken away at the end of March by officials from the capital.
Meanwhile, when one searches on Weibo in Chinese for Li Delin, a financial journalist who also blogged extensively on the case, the following notice appears:
Recently, some lawless individuals have used Sina microblog to make up and spread rumors for no reason, which has had a bad effect. They are now being dealt with by Public Security according to the law.
There were a few comments on Weibo about these notices. A student called Zhang Shaoyan wrote:
This [notice] made me think of how our textbooks had described the Kuomintang [Chinese Nationalist Party]. It’s been eighty years, but now the mountains are on our own heads.
Zhang’s comparison of the tactics of the ruling party with the Kuomintang (defeated by the Communist Party during the Chinese civil war) is hardly original. There was a reason he felt so strongly: one of his microblogs had just been deleted.
3 May 2012 | China
In a day of dramatic developments, the blind Chinese lawyer who left the US embassy in Beijing yesterday has called on Barack Obama to do everything possible to let his family leave China.
“I would like to say to (President Obama): Please do everything you can to get our whole family out,” 40-year-old activist Chen Guangcheng told CNN.
Chen, who spent six days under US diplomatic protection, says originally he did not plan to leave China but he was forced to leave the embassy for Beijing’s Chaoyang hospital because US officials told him of threats by Chinese authorities to send his wife and children back to their home in Shandong province — where they were subject to house arrest.
Chen told Channel 4 News:
I came [to Chaoyang hospital] because of an agreement. I was worried about the safety of my family. A gang of them have taken over our house, sitting in our room and eating at our table, waving thick sticks around.
They’ve turned our home into a prison, with seven cameras and electric fence all around.
He has also said he hopes to leave the People’s Republic on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plane when she leaves China after bilateral talks later this week.
US officials said today that they are still trying to assist Chen and denied he was pressured to leave the embassy.
Chen’s jarring account emerged after a spectacularly brave move by his close friend Zeng Jinyan (who wrote for Index about growing support for the dissident here). The activist tweeted yesterday that she had spoken to Chen and and his wife, Yuan Weijing, who said they had received threats of being beaten to death if he left the country.
Chen’s wife told CNN that the family’s life was in danger and that matters had worsened since the activist’s escape. “Right now, we can’t even freely use our phone. I can’t even freely walk out of the hospital,” she said, adding:
After Guangcheng got out, the government was persuading me to stay here. But they were also tightening their grip on me. I became really worried. If they ever get us back home, they would put us in an iron cage.
These developments contrast with US officials’ prior claims yesterday that Chen had planned to remain in China to continue his work by studying law at university, and that the Chinese government had given them assurances of his safety.
In the last the 36 hours the unsettling — and often confusing — story has unravelled into a diplomatic storm between China and the United States. Negotiations had been ongoing since Chen’s dramatic escape to Beijing from over 18 months under house arrest in the village of Dongshigu, Shandong province last week. Clinton said earlier this week that a “constructive relationship” between the two powers “includes talking very frankly about those areas where we do not agree, including human rights”.
Meanwhile, nationalist Chinese tabloid the Global Times said in an editorial today that it was “meaningless” to use Chen’s case to attack China’s human rights, arguing that the country’s progress in improving its human rights record would not be “beleaguered” by such moves:
It is certain that Chen’s case is only an interlude for China’s development. It will not undermine social stability, nor will it hinder the normal development and progress of China’s human rights. China can take a composed attitude when such cases happen again.
Chen, noted for his efforts to expose forced abortions, spent four years in prison on charges of disturbing public order before being placed under house arrest. He won the Index on Censorship whistleblowing award for his activities in 2007.
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco
