Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
<strong>Beijing</strong> <strong>Olympics</strong> <strong>2008</strong>: <strong>Winning</strong> <strong>Press</strong> <strong>Freedom</strong><br />
78<br />
protesting a rule on the wearing of head scarves. We needed to get independent<br />
confirmation, so we tapped our Mandarin service which started to make phone calls into<br />
the region and after 60 phone calls found the tiny village that the Uighurs lived in and was<br />
able to find eyewitness reports that confirmed the story. 3<br />
One of the advantages of doing four languages, and while I am on the subject of Uighurs,<br />
yesterday there was some discussion about the Uighur repression which I think we all<br />
agree is among the harshest in China. I don't know if we have an appreciation of how big<br />
this population is. Between the Uighurs and Tibetans it is conservatively 17 million people<br />
and the land covers about a third of the territory of China, or what the Chinese call China.<br />
Their natural resources are being harvested by China and sent to other parts of China.<br />
What is happening I don't think should be characterized as ethnic minority treatment by<br />
China’s government. I think it’s much more significant than that. But I digress.<br />
One of the things I wanted to talk about is the interference with Radio Free Asia. We are<br />
jammed. We think the Chinese government spends at least as much money jamming us<br />
as we spend programming. There are towers built in the last five or six years in Xinjiang<br />
and in Tibet specifically jamming outside entities and their news broadcasts. We do three<br />
Tibetan dialects. One of our unique abilities to harvest sourcing inside the country is that<br />
we speak dialects. You know people trust people that speak their language.<br />
Once we got our dialect programming up on Tibetan broadcasting, China coincidentally<br />
started to do Tibetan dialect broadcasting - unfortunately, at the same times that we do.<br />
We get letters from our listeners, who have to go outside the country to send us mail<br />
because, otherwise, it mysteriously disappears en route. We had one listener who wrote<br />
and said every time she hears a listener read on the air she gets so excited because<br />
somebody managed to get a letter to us.<br />
Another thing, which I don't think is coincidence, is that since March 10 Radio Free Asia<br />
has been attacked as supposedly being part of this Dalai Lama clique that the central<br />
news has been making accusations about. We have even been condemned by the Havana<br />
government, which is shockingly sympathetic to China and which accuses Radio Free Asia<br />
of participating in, basically, activism - which, again, we don't do.<br />
A note on propaganda: The power of propaganda is huge and I think that we<br />
underestimate the Chinese propaganda machine both inside and outside the country. I<br />
had my father to lunch the other day. He was saying the Tibetans should stop<br />
embarrassing our country because we are losing face, and I said, “Daddy, perhaps there<br />
are people who object to the characterization of Tibet as China.” I think that in the<br />
Western world some of the backlash is predicated on a notion that China is appropriately<br />
trying to settle unrest in its country. I think that we should question some of the basic<br />
assumptions that are perpetrated worldwide.<br />
The cyber-attacks? Does anyone think that the government isn't complicit? One of the<br />
primary goals and outcomes of these espionage and cyber-attacks is to break trust in<br />
the community of dissidents, activists, NGO workers and news sources. If they are able to