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

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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create an environment where a person that we interview can't trust that the e-mails or the
phone calls come from Radio Free Asia, what does that do to our ability to communicate
the news effectively? I can't even be sure if I click on an e-mail from someone I know with
an attachment that I know I am going to get, that a RAT [remote administration tool]
hasn't been planted on my system. So what does that do to all of us in our ability to work
together? I think that is something that bears talking out.
On the nationalism aspect, a story that is very big in the US now is this Duke student
Grace Wang, who tried to talk between a Tibetan group and a group of Chinese students.
She is Han Chinese - so am I - but she has been just eviscerated in cyber-space. I’ve seen
e-mails from people who want to burn her alive. You can't imagine that someone could be
so angry. Her parents are on the run in China because people in their village attack them. 4
It's just shocking what kind of fervor this nationalism is getting into and, I agree with the
observation that perhaps it is not all spontaneous. But it does feed into a fear hysteria that
has been planted in the Chinese nationalists for a long, long time and was just waiting
below the surface to rise to a boil. All of it is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Yet,
when people hear accounts of that they can't believe it could have happened.
This hate speech is very similar, but I don't want you to think that the Han Chinese feel
this way. Our listeners call in saying, “Tell the Tibetan people that not all Han hate them.
Tell the Tibetan people that we believe that if they did rise and protest, then the Chinese
government must have done something to warrant it.”
In closing, imagine the power of this propaganda machine. This is a world that has been
created where [Uighur activist and businesswoman] Rebiya Kadir is called a terrorist and
the Dalai Lama is called a liar.
The complexity and the money they have invested in jamming all our peripheral
broadcasts is the most frequent issue for our callers, who also experience blocking of their
phones. They call 50 times and when they get through they say, “Could you help us with
the jamming problem?” We wish we could. The US government does object all the time
about the jamming, but obviously, it is just a coincidence that they broadcast alternate
programming [on the same frequencies] at the same time as us!
They don't want the news to get to their own people in their own language and they don't
want the news to get out to the world. So that's our job.
1 Units of information transferable by repeated action from one mind to another.
2 A group known for hacker activity, mainly from mainland China. Literally, the name means “Red Guest.”
3 Radio Free Asia reported that several hundred Uighurs were taken into custody after demonstrating in
Hotan and a neighboring county in the Xinjiang region on March 23. It said demonstrators were
demanding that authorities not ban head scarves in the predominantly Muslim region and that they stop
torturing Uighurs and release all political prisoners.
4 Duke University undergraduate Grace Wang tried to mediate a heated interchange on campus over
the Tibetan independence movement. She stressed that she doesn't support Tibetan independence;
she just wanted to intervene when she saw a crowd of 400 to 500 people - mostly Chinese citizens –
squaring off against 12 pro-Tibet protesters.