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