Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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the voices of the reformers. After the Tiananmen massacres, the draft was completely
abandoned. That is why today, the various levels of power can exert pressure on
journalists with total impunity.
Freedom of the press and human rights constitute the most serious problem now facing
China. At the approach of the Olympic Games, all Chinese who have suffered oppression
hope to be able to use this occasion to seek justice; the international community hopes
that the Chinese government will improve the situation of the press and human rights in
line with the pledge made in 2001. But the Chinese authorities see these internal and
external pressures as “politicization of the Olympic Games.” Unhappily, counterattacking
these criticisms by repressing freedom of the press only underlines this contradiction.
Today, the Chinese press industry is increasing at the same pace as the economy as a
whole. In 2005, it represented one seventh of the world’s press industry. Otherwise, the
industry has unhappily not changed since the epoch of Mao Zedong.
The director of the Central Publicity Department (formerly the Central Propaganda
Department) was promoted to the Politburo at the Communist Party’s 14h Congress.
It is no longer possible today to control the press by increasing the number of posts in the
propaganda bureaus. Instead, the Publicity Department and the General Administration of
Press and Publications (GAPP) have recruited a large number of press review officials, and
the provincial and local bureaus have done the same. The press review officials are
generally retired senior officials who are paid for their work and required above all to be
politically “reliable.”
In general, they write one report a month, or more if the situation demands. These
reports are used by the Publicity Department and the GAPP as sources for articles in
Xinwen Yueping (Review of the News), a publication of whose tone and language recall
those of the Cultural Revolution. The affair of Bing Dian (Freezing Point), which caught the
attention of the international community, began in fact with an article that appeared in
Xinwen Yueping.
China is the only country in the world that practices such censorship of the press and of all
publishing outlets, as shown by the surprising number of such press review officials.
During times of crisis, the media have no right of initiative and are obliged to carry only
information from the official agency Xinhua. That is how the Publicity Department has
managed to extend its control over the press and publications aacross the country.
This system is a hundred times more perverse than the one in Prussia that even Marx
criticized in his time. Let us give some other examples: in March 2007, the economic
magazine Caijing appeared with a cover-page interview with the jurist Jiang Ping, which
stated that “the General Affairs Office of the Central Committee had decreed that the law
on property should be adopted by the National People’s Congress.” The Publicity
Department, in a fit of fury, ordered all copies of the magazine to be withdrawn from sale,
and that a new cover be substituted at the magazine's expense.