Chinese government prefers 'preserving stability' over freedom of information
Dim Hopes for a Free Press in China
By XIAO SHU, NYT
GUANGZHOU, China
A STANDOFF between one of China’s biggest newspapers, Southern Weekend, and the national government ended last week with compromises on both sides. Southern Weekend hit the newsstands as usual on Thursday, after protesting staff members backed down from a threatened strike. The authorities, for their part, made tacit concessions, ending pre-publication censorship by the Communist Party’s propaganda arm in Guangdong Province and permitting greater editorial independence.
The episode drew worldwide attention to the problem of press freedom in China and threatened to escalate into broader protests across Chinese society. Over the past decade, standards of journalistic professionalism have risen in China, even though most news organizations are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the state. These news outlets do not challenge the basic legitimacy of Communist rule, but have raised their standards for evaluating news according to journalistic significance rather than party interests.
But in the last few years, amid rising social unrest, the government has intensified its efforts at “preserving stability.” One consequence has been a dramatic increase in control of the media. As a senior commentator at Southern Weekend for six years, I experienced both the flourishing of journalistic professionalism and its decline. Although I sometimes sharply criticized the government, my standpoint was impartial and balanced rather than antagonistic, and I did my best to maintain a position of independent neutrality. Most of my colleagues at Southern Weekend took the same approach.
Even so, at the end of March 2011, I was forced to resign from Southern Weekend, without any warning or explanation. This was a time of heightened tensions, when the authorities worried that the democratic revolutions taking place in the Middle East and North Africa might spread to China, and cracked down on individuals seen as potentially encouraging unrest. The pressure on commentators like me followed a similar crackdown on investigative reporting, much of which had been devoted to exposing corruption and had threatened special interest groups that are influential in elite Chinese politics.
(More here.)
GUANGZHOU, China
A STANDOFF between one of China’s biggest newspapers, Southern Weekend, and the national government ended last week with compromises on both sides. Southern Weekend hit the newsstands as usual on Thursday, after protesting staff members backed down from a threatened strike. The authorities, for their part, made tacit concessions, ending pre-publication censorship by the Communist Party’s propaganda arm in Guangdong Province and permitting greater editorial independence.
The episode drew worldwide attention to the problem of press freedom in China and threatened to escalate into broader protests across Chinese society. Over the past decade, standards of journalistic professionalism have risen in China, even though most news organizations are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the state. These news outlets do not challenge the basic legitimacy of Communist rule, but have raised their standards for evaluating news according to journalistic significance rather than party interests.
But in the last few years, amid rising social unrest, the government has intensified its efforts at “preserving stability.” One consequence has been a dramatic increase in control of the media. As a senior commentator at Southern Weekend for six years, I experienced both the flourishing of journalistic professionalism and its decline. Although I sometimes sharply criticized the government, my standpoint was impartial and balanced rather than antagonistic, and I did my best to maintain a position of independent neutrality. Most of my colleagues at Southern Weekend took the same approach.
Even so, at the end of March 2011, I was forced to resign from Southern Weekend, without any warning or explanation. This was a time of heightened tensions, when the authorities worried that the democratic revolutions taking place in the Middle East and North Africa might spread to China, and cracked down on individuals seen as potentially encouraging unrest. The pressure on commentators like me followed a similar crackdown on investigative reporting, much of which had been devoted to exposing corruption and had threatened special interest groups that are influential in elite Chinese politics.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home