Monday, Mar 24, 2003

Before hopes for enlightened governance from the fourth generation Chinese leadership are set too high, the world needs a reality check. The new crop of leaders in China is aiming for continuity in the shape of former president Jiang Zemin's style of rule and not for substantive political change. Unless something tumultuous occurs, China will continue to be a capitalist-authoritarian dictatorship into the foreseeable future.

While the state may gradually retreat from people's lives, as it has been doing over the past decade, it will not relinquish control over areas that the Communist Party views to be crucial to maintaining social order. And as with any authoritarian regime, foremost among these in the party's eyes is the media.

China's propaganda machine has been tireless in attempting to block "subversive" or "obscene" information entering China via the Internet. To this end, the government has set up its Internet infrastructure so that all data to enter the country from abroad must pass through eight central servers which filter out content with certain keywords.

These keyword blocks prevent people from downloading pages with content referring to the banned Falun Gong [group], the China Democracy Party and reports on human rights in China, among other pesky issues the government prefers its people know nothing about. In one instance, a story several months ago on the Taipei Times Web site on Falun Gong in Taiwan could not be downloaded while the rest of the Web site was accessible.

As advanced as the system is, the government at times finds it necessary to block entire sites. Last year, for example, the search engine Google was blocked in China reportedly because propaganda officials discovered that searches for Falun Gong could bring up thousands of results. But after researchers and academics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country's central think tank, complained that they couldn't survive without Google, the site was restored.

More recently, The New York Times and the Washington Post Web sites have been blocked for the past three weeks in China. CNN.com has also been sporadically blocked. This is rumored to be because the government doesn't want reports from these papers about the National People's Congress to reach people here. If the sites have indeed been blocked for political reasons, then it is an ironic testament to the incompetence of China's propaganda officials, that the International Herald Tribune, which contains most of the political stories by The New York Times, can still be accessed.

The waste of resources in blocking foreign news content is eclipsed, though, by the lengths to which the government goes to keep the domestic media in line.

On one occasion a memo was left on the desk in the recording studio at the radio station where I work. It warned not to mentioned the name of a Falun Gong follower who had jumped off a building in Nanjing to protest the government's policy against the [group]. [Editor's note: According to the teachings of Falun Gong, it is sinful to commit suicide. Practitioners in China were often forced to jump off a building to avoid being arrested or they were simply thrown out of a window by police officers who later deceived the public with lies that practitioners committed suicide.]

"Don't let these three characters leave your mouths!" the memo read. It also said to immediately cut off callers who tried to say the name or anything related to the [...] protest. I'm not invited to editorial meetings, but my co-hosts tell me that along with editorial decisions, meetings are dominated by boring political lectures.

Compounding this type of direct censorship is the more banal self-censorship that's apparent in hosts' aversion to talking about anything remotely political. Taiwan tops the list of sensitive political topics even if the discussion is about Taiwanese music. The radio hosts I've worked with have all tried to coach me to say "China Taiwan" in any mention of Taiwan, and if possible to not talk about Taiwan at all.

The censorship moves from ludicrous to dangerous when important news doesn't reach people. Last week a factory in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, exploded when it was reportedly struck by lightning. The blast blew out windows over a kilometer away and locals said about 20 people were killed. But this tragedy wasn't reported in national media. I learned of it from an acquaintance from online discussions.

To the greatest extent that its stretched resources can afford, the Chinese government continues to use the media as a tool to spread only the information that it deems correct. Alternative viewpoints and independent investigative reporting are discouraged through various disincentives or outright censorship. Alternately, if the offending news is from abroad, the government may actively seek to block its entering the country.

There is little indication that China's new leadership will loosen its controls on the media. On the contrary, Jiang was vocal about the need for more "patriotic reporting." We can expect President Hu Jintao to carry this unseemly torch into China's next phase of development. The result will be that serious public debate on issues such as Taiwan, foreign policy and the country's panoply of social problems will be constrained to the narrow framework delineated by the Chinese Communist Party. This will not serve anyone's interests. But by far the greatest danger in keeping its population docile and uninformed will be to China.

Max Woodworth is a host at two radio stations in Jiangsu Province.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2003/03/24/199302