Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...
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<strong>Beijing</strong> <strong>Olympics</strong> <strong>2008</strong>: <strong>Winning</strong> <strong>Press</strong> <strong>Freedom</strong><br />
33<br />
Often the control measures lack any kind of legitimacy. Instead, the Communist Party's<br />
Publicity [propaganda] Department tells newspapers, television stations and magazines,<br />
“you should not cover this, you should not cover that.” If anyone does not obey, they will<br />
face a lot of trouble. They risk jail and could be sentenced to 10 or 12 years in prison.<br />
Of course, it is better now than in Mao Zedong’s times, because then anyone who<br />
disobeyed the authorities would lose his life.<br />
So many journalists and writers nowadays lose their jobs and even their freedom, simply<br />
because they post their political opinions on the Internet.<br />
Shi Tao, an award-winning journalist, was arrested for “illegally providing state secrets to<br />
foreign entities” after he used his Yahoo account to e-mail notes about government<br />
directives on media coverage of the 2004 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.<br />
The police already had Shi under observation and identified him within 24 hours of the<br />
message being sent. But it was not until six months later that he was arrested. He was<br />
sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2005. Court records indicated that Shi’s arrest and<br />
conviction was based in part on information provided to Chinese authorities by Yahoo.<br />
Chinese lawyers are reluctant to get involved in media and civil rights cases because of<br />
the threats to their own livelihoods.<br />
In China, there are about 150,000 lawyers, but only maybe 15 human rights lawyers. Of<br />
these 15 lawyers, 90 per cent have lost their jobs and some of them have been sentenced<br />
to jail. Two of them have been sent to labor camp. Three of them were fired by their law<br />
firms. I mention this because human rights lawyers are experts in law, but they<br />
themselves have no human rights. So ordinary people in China, how can they have human<br />
rights? Of course, they have none.<br />
I did research to try to find out why media control in China is so serious. The main reason,<br />
I think, is that Chinese government is losing confidence in itself.<br />
The authorities know that if they relax control over the media, their authoritarian regime<br />
would be faced with collapse. But now they are being increasingly challenged online,<br />
which is why the propaganda department has introduced 55 regulations just to control the<br />
Internet.