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

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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In the past year, China cracked down on journalists. In fact, while foreign journalists may
have gained more freedom to report, just the opposite is happening to Chinese journalists
in their own country. There has been a tightening of media controls and increasing
harassment of journalists, political activists and human rights advocates. As one of your
sponsor organizations, Reporters Without Borders, has pointed out, 29 Chinese journalists
- others say 50 - were arrested in 2007, more than anywhere else in the world.
Nevertheless, China today is not that of Mao Zedong, where people were persecuted for
who they were, not just for what they said and did. Thus, Mao purged writers in 1955,
intellectuals in 1957 and members of his own Communist Party whom he believed were
conspiring against him in the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. In the post-Mao
period, there is more personal, economic, artistic and intellectual freedom, but there is no
political freedom. Anyone who publicly criticizes the party's political policies or tries to
organize with others to make a political statement or take a political action is persecuted
and jailed.
A new phenomenon, however, has developed in the post-Mao era that may have
increasing influence on political events, including events in Tibet and Xinjiang. It is the
emergence of a middle class. Most members of China's rising middle class are not a
bourgeoisie, a class that first appeared in Paris. They are not independent actors. Most of
China's middle class are rising entrepreneurs, who are quickly inducted into the party. This
partnership works well for both the party and the entrepreneurs. Membership gets the
entrepreneurs' compliance with party dictates, while providing the entrepreneurs with
access to land, resources and markets. The entrepreneurs are unable to conduct their
business without connections to the party. Nevertheless, this rising middle class made
possible by China's move to a market economy in the post-Mao period has spawned on its
fringes a number of public intellectuals, journalists and defense lawyers who act more
independently.
Despite the fact that, unlike the rising entrepreneurs, they do not have the protection of
the party, a small number of them have spoken out on sensitive political issues, have
helped defend those who are accused of “political” crimes and have joined with ordinary
people in their protests against the party's corruption and confiscation of their land for
modernization projects. For the first time in the People's Republic, intellectuals are joining
with ordinary people in protests against injustice, which I describe in my last book “From
Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China.”
Because China's move to the market has made it possible for journalists, lawyers and
public intellectuals to earn incomes independent of party control, it allows these groups
more freedom to speak out and to act publicly on political issues than during the Mao era.
For example, in the post-Mao era, most newspapers are no longer totally supported
economically by the state. They have to find their own commercial support and to do that,
their editors and journalists have made great efforts to enliven their newspapers to gain
readership. One of the most successful in these efforts has been the Southern Weekend
(Nanfang Zhoumo) in Guangdong. Its investigative and daring articles have upset the
party and several of its editors and journalists have been purged and some imprisoned,
but the paper continues its independent stance and maintains its popularity.