Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the Press Index, released Monday at World Press Freedom Day events in Washington, show that press freedoms are on the decline throughout the world as authoritarian regimes tighten their control over new media forms of communication and as worsening violence in countries like Mexico has pushed more journalists into self-censorship. (more…)
China’s Global Times Chinese edition is well known for being a nationalist paper owned by the Communist Party. The Chinese edition is often peppered with official jargon and an attitude to Western countries that can be summarized as a pugnacious China criticizing a west that wants to see China fail.
It is therefore a surprise that today the English edition of the Global Times published an article on the architect of China’s Internet censorship system, colloquially known as the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall, or the GFW, is the filtering device that censors keywords and causes websites to be blocked. The man named Fang Binxing was in the news recently for signing up to China’s Twitter, Sina weibo, and then quickly shutting the account after netizens accused him of being an enemy of netizens.
Fang, a 50-year-old President of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications was born in the cold Northeast, where he also earned degrees and teaching post at the prestigious Harbin Institute of Technology. Then at the age of 39 he turned to work for the “National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team” (according to the Global Times article). Various accolades from government bodies and a post at the National University of Defense Technology put Fang into the political mainstream. In this rare and astounding interview he says that he developed the GFW technology as a defense tool, something that can protect China from harm caused by foreign forces. To illustrate this point, in the interview he gave he said:
“Some countries hope North Korea will open up its Internet,” he says. “But if it really did so, other countries would get the upper hand.”
Because of the high traffic that the article has generated, the journalist who interviewed Fang Binxing, Fang Yunyu (unrelated) told me tonight in Beijing that she was afraid of the impact that it was having. By 6:30pm, both the Guardian and LA Times had reposted content from the article, with supplementary reporting on the “Father of the Great Firewall”. For a state paper, too much controversy wasn’t good, especially when it reflected negatively on the country.
Today, when I asked Zola, a prominent citizen journalist and internet specialist, whether he thought of Fang Binxing as an enemy, and why he thought Fang would give an interview to the Global Times, he told me:
I think Fang Binxing is an enemy of the netizen: he blocks websites, helps the government control information, disrupts emails, and increases the capital for netizens to go online [because they have to purchase proxies and VPNs]. Also, the people did not give him this power. If I had the right to vote, I would vote against Fang Binxing.
He agreed to the interview by the Global Times English edition because it’s a domestic paper, so perhaps he thought it would be safe. But we think that the English edition actually has less limitations in terms of news and speech, and compared to the Chinese edition it is more to the point.
Indeed, this time, Global Times English edition hit the nail on the head, and despite journalist Fang Yunyu’s worries, the article has its interview subject has hit the mainstream. On Chinese platform Yeeyan, a translation of the article has already appeared. One user calling himself Shen Yichen, leaves a comment: “This post will be on fire soon, so leave a comment to make a mark.”
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its ninth annual World Press Freedom Index today, with a mixed bag of what secretary-general Jean François Julliard calls “welcome surprises” and “sombre realities”.
Six countries, all in Europe, share the top spot this year — Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland — described as the “engines of press freedom”. But over half of the European Union’s member states lie outside the top 20, with some significantly lower entries, such as Romania in 52nd place and Greece and Bulgaria tied at 70th. The report expresses grave concerns that the EU will lose its status as world leader on human rights issues if so many of its members continue to fall down the rankings.
The edges of Europe fared particularly badly this year; Ukraine (131st) and Turkey (138th) have fallen to “historically low” rankings, and despite a rise of 13 places, Russia remains in the worst 25 per cent of countries at 140th. It ranks lower than Zimbabwe, which continues to make steady — albeit fragile — progress, rising to 123rd.
At the very bottom of the table lie Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan, as they have done since the index first began in 2002. Along with Yemen, China, Sudan, Syria, Burma and Iran, they makes up the group of worst offenders, characterised by “persecution of the media” and a “complete lack of news and information”. RSF says it is getting harder and harder to distinguish between these lowest ten countries, who continue to deteriorate. There are particular fears about the situation for journalists in Burma ahead of next month’s parliamentary election.
Another country creating cause for concern in the run-up to elections is Azerbaijan, falling six places to 152nd. Index on Censorship recently joined other organisations in a visit to Baku to assess the health of the country’s media. You can read about their findings in a joint mission report, ‘Free Expression under Attack: Azerbaijan’s Deteriorating Media Environment’, launching this Thursday, 28 October, 6.30 pm, at the Free Word Centre. Belarus, another country on which Index is campaigning, languishes at 154th.
It is worth noting, though, that relative press freedom rankings can only tell so much. Cuba, for example, has risen out of the bottom 20 countries for the first time, partly thanks to its release of 14 journalists and 22 activists this summer, but journalists still face censorship and repression “on a daily basis”. Similarly, countries such as South Korea and Gabon have climbed more than 20 places, only to return to the position they held before a particularly bad 2009. It seems, then, that the struggle for press freedom across the world must continue to be a “battle of vigilance”.
The video-sharing website has wrongly barred Iranians from its documentary experiment, Life in a Day, because of US sanctions. Negar Esfandiary reports
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