Monday, June 25, 2001

CHINA: Last month I popped into the newsagents in the state-run Friendship Store to buy the International Herald Tribune and the latest issue of The Economist.

Almost embarrassed, the shop assistant pointed out that several pages had been cut out of The Economist, and two pages were missing from the Herald Tribune. I put both copies back on the newsstand and walked away.

As soon as I got home I logged on to The Economist website and purchased the two missing articles with my credit card for $2.95 each. One was about executions in China. The other was about the widening gap between rich and poor and the threat to China's social stability. I was also able to access the Herald Tribune website and read, free of charge, the paper in full.

The butchering and, in some cases, the outright banning of foreign newspapers and magazines is nothing new here. But the censors have been busier than usual of late.

An April edition of Time magazine could not be bought because it contained an article on the banned Falun Gong movement. In the last two months, articles on China have also been missing from the Far East Economic Review, the region's top news and current affairs weekly.

One was a piece on the detention of Chinese-born US-based scholars. Newsweek has not escaped the censors either and has suffered at the hands of busy officials armed with scissors in the [party' name omitted] Party's Central Propaganda Department.

Foreign newspapers, as well as the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and the Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, are only available in the Friendship Store after 6 p.m. each day. This is partly because officials are busy during the day scanning them for what they consider to be offensive material.

Chinese cyberspace has not escaped the censors either, with a huge number of foreign websites blocked, including the BBC, CNN and the New York Times. For the last few months, the websites of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald have been inaccessible.

Sites maintained by the banned Falun Gong movement and other dissident groups are, predictably, permanently banned. During the recent spy plane crisis, access to foreign news websites was even more tightly controlled than normal.

The domestic newspaper scene has also recently been hard hit by the censors. Three weeks ago, Mr Qian Gang, the deputy editor-in-chief, and Mr Chang Ping, the front-page news editor of the controversial Sydney Morning Herald newspaper were forced to step down following an investigation by the State News and Publishing Bureau.

There are reports that several other journalists on the paper are also under investigation and may yet face the sack. And what was the Sydney Morning Herald 's crime? Simply to suggest that the problems of the countryside have been caused, rather than resolved, by the authorities.

Last week a senior editor of the Dahebao newspaper in China's central province of Henan was sacked after his paper ran two stories about corruption. One hinted that government medical officials received bribes and sexual favours; the other quoted overseas business people complaining about bad administration and corrupt government in the city of Zhoukou.

On June 7th a newspaper was shut down in the southern region of Guangxi because it was operated by a private company. Police were called last Tuesday when more than 100 staff staged a protest at the newspaper's closure.

Recently the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists accused China of being amongst one of the world's worst enemies of the press. It said the [party' name omitted] Party maintained obsessive control over information and that 22 journalists were jailed for their work in China last year.

The Chinese domestic media scene is changing rapidly and will, by its sheer size, be harder to control in the future. Over the past 15 years the number of daily newspapers published has soared from almost 180 to 2160.

The official [party' name omitted] Party newspaper, the People's Daily, is still the most popular newspaper with a daily readership of 2.2 million.

The timing of this latest surge in Chinese censorship activity is strange in that it comes on the eve of the decision on the 2008 Olympics. If Beijing is successful in its bid to host the world's greatest sporting event, 10,000 foreign journalists will descend on China to cover the game. Then the Chinese censors will surely have their work cut out.

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/0625/wor19.htm