China ratchets up control on expression

[Thom Little]

BEIJING - An emotional strike by 100 journalists at this city's most popular and lively newspaper follows a 16-month campaign to quash a broad range of "unapproved" public speech in areas verging on politics or society - a campaign that includes Internet blogs, and new restrictions on cellphones designed to smoke outsenders of renegade text messages.

In the case of Beijing News, whose progressive editor Yang Bin was replaced without warning last week, Chinese authorities dealt a seemingly fatal blow to a publishing project that two years ago gave the press some freedom to experiment.

.......

The sudden move on Beijing News is part of a systematic effort by the central propaganda department in Beijing to more-closely police speech and expression. In the past year, the party initiated the broadest ideological education campaign in a decade. In part, that campaign discourages liberality and freedom of expression. The official news service Xinhua this week, in fact, selected this party campaign as its No. 1 story of 2005, calling it "a massive political and ideological education drive among more than 68 million CPC members to maintain their moral and socialist ethical superiority, a new, great project to promote Party construction." As a result, in the past year "public intellectuals" that spoke out on social welfare or the environment have been curbed from doing so in state media.

Last summer a set of editors resigned from the Economic Times citing a loss of the paper's core values. A plan by China Youth Daily to tie reporters' salary bonuses to the degree of praise by party officials was narrowly scotched. Last week the monthly magazine Bai Xing, whose readership is similar to that of Beijing News, was told to remove its interactive web commentary, its investigative news department, and the magazine's slogan, "recording China in change."

Bai Xing editor Huang Liangtian was quoted in the South China Morning Post as saying that "we are required to focus more on culture and lifestyle topics."




http://csmonitor.com/2006/0103/p06s01-woap.html

[madeline_con]

1. China's Internet: Let a Thousand Filters Bloom

Aided by US technology companies, Beijing tightens its control of information flow

(snip)

A heated debate continues in the media and in cyberspace: Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee who maintains a popular technology weblog, rose to his company's defense against a storm of criticism. "We must comply with the local laws if we want to do business there," he wrote, claiming to have encountered an "anti-free-speech" stance from students, professors, and officials in China.


Outraged Chinese bloggers called for a boycott of MSN Spaces. One of China's most famous bloggers called Microsoft "evil." A few days later Scoble backed down, admitting that he was wrong. Microsoft as a company, however, has stuck to the following statement: "MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates."


(snip)

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5928

[Endangered Specie]

2. Time for another Great Leap Foward!

:eyes: