The global press will celebrate World Press Freedom Day, created by the United Nations, this Monday, May 3, with this year’s 30th anniversary theme of “information as public good. But journalists in China, both national and foreign, say this year’s theme and the day itself are “a source of shame and embarrassment,” especially as the ruling regime tightens its grip on press and speech space in China.
A senior Chinese journalist, who asked not to be named, said in an interview with the Voice of America that “this holiday has nothing to do with the Chinese. He said it was “shameful and embarrassing” to have the Chinese comment on the anniversary!
The Beijing-based journalist said he and several of his contemporaries “have gone silent” as the space for expression in China has tightened and the overall political environment has deteriorated. Even though they can use VPNs (virtual private networks) to climb over walls and browse social media such as Twitter or Facebook, he said, they rarely leave comments or openly comment on sensitive issues and current events.
He added that over the past six or seven years, China has increasingly lost the space for investigative and in-depth reporting. The few journalists who have insisted on in-depth reporting or monitoring the government have faced harassment or arrest by police, a chilling effect that has deterred many from doing so or have chosen to “shut up.
He said that the Chinese journalism community has called for a “press law” to protect journalists, but for years, there has been no official response because any response would be embarrassing to officials. He also said that the current “silent” development of the Chinese press is what officials would like to see, because without media oversight, officials can do whatever they want and will not be held accountable.
The real news is dead
He said he hasn’t read the current Chinese press for years because he believes “it’s not news at all, and real news is dead.”
The veteran journalist said he is very pessimistic about the future of China’s news environment. Therefore, he urged the younger generation, especially those who still have aspirations for journalism, to leave China if they have the chance and go to a country where they can show their ambitions, otherwise they may not have much room to show their ambitions if they continue to stay in the Chinese journalism circle.
Reporters Without Borders, an organization dedicated to promoting freedom of the press worldwide, also has a rather negative opinion of China, calling it the greatest threat to freedom of the press and freedom of expression worldwide.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Cédric Alviani, director of RSF’s East Asia office, said that China has launched a “big foreign propaganda campaign” in recent years to change its international image and tell the Chinese story, but also to distort the nature of independent journalism into a government propaganda effort that serves only the interests of one party and “patriot journalism”.
Journalism’s worst enemy
In the case of China, Reporters Without Borders considers China to be the world’s worst enemy of journalism and the world’s worst enemy of freedom of information,” said Ai Wei’ang. Not only does the Communist regime oppress its own people, but freedom of the press and information has suffered serious setbacks over the past decade.”
Ai Wei’ang said China has increased its foreign propaganda through television and radio, and has taken advantage of the open press and speech space in various countries to infiltrate speech, including the dissemination of false statements and disinformation. He said this has had a negative impact on democracies and their open societies, and he therefore called on democracies to step up their scrutiny of China’s foreign propaganda efforts, official media and party media, and demand that they, like most independent media, strictly adhere to the responsibility of the press as a social tool and the journalistic standards of fair reporting, or else reasonable restrictions or sanctions should be imposed on the media propaganda machine as an agent of political parties.
After the U.K. revoked the broadcasting license of the official media China Global Television (CGTN) in the U.K. in early February for violating broadcasting regulations, Germany followed suit and suspended the broadcast. According to Evian, both the UK and German decisions were justified by law and not comparable to China’s retaliatory ban on the BBC World News.
Prospects for improvement unclear
According to the Reporters Without Borders Global Press Freedom Index 2021, released in late April, China ranked 177th, or fourth from the bottom, out of 180 countries worldwide. Although the ranking remains unchanged, Evian said the press environment in China has deteriorated unprecedentedly over the past year, with no prospect of improvement in sight.
China also has by far the highest number of jailed journalists in the world, with more than 120 jailed, many of whom have had their personal safety threatened. Several citizen journalists, including Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, Li Zehua and Zhang Zhan, have either disappeared or been imprisoned since the outbreak of the new epidemic last year, after having braved the risks of traveling to the infected areas to expose the truth about the epidemic. Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer who practiced in Shanghai, was sentenced to four years in prison late last year on charges of “provoking and provoking trouble.
China has also been extremely hostile to foreign journalists, expelling an unprecedented 18 of them in the past year, including former BBC correspondent John Sudworth, according to Ai Wei’ang.
Tony Cheng, a Chinese-British national, was a special correspondent for China Global Television Network (CGTN) in Bangkok, Thailand, from 2011 to 2020, contributing to its English-language channel (formerly known as CCTV English).
In an interview with the Voice of America, he said he was passionate about contributing his experience to enhance the quality of Global TV, coming from international media outlets such as the BBC and Al Jazeera English.
He said that in his first few years at Globe TV, the atmosphere was quite open and the channel invested a lot of money and resources to improve quality, which made him believe that the quality of Globe TV would evolve and mature with time. But in the latter years, limited by the political acceptance of the principals, he saw that the channel had limited room for improvement, lacked trust in experienced staff, and the editors began to change the content of his contributions more drastically, which made him think of leaving his job.
Tighter and tighter straitjacket
I’ve been given many opportunities to cover the Middle East, and I’ve done a lot of stories that I’m proud of,” Jung says. But over the past four years, I’ve felt that the editorial control has become tighter and tighter. With the Belt and Road policy, all of a sudden, let’s just say, coverage of Southeast Asian countries has become a sensitive issue at every turn. There are some topics that they don’t want to discuss at all.”
For example, when covering Cambodia, he was asked to avoid mentioning the Khmer Rouge regime, which at one point sparked a heated conversation between him and his editorial desk. The biggest problem he saw, Cheng said, was that editorial stations began to intentionally avoid talking about many major regional happenings, such as the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, human rights issues, the royal family and social unrest in Thailand, even the development of Alibaba in Thailand, and Hong Kong issues. In the last two years, he says, the “straitjacket on Globe TV has gotten tighter and tighter.”
As a Chinese-American, Cheng said he was happy to see Globe TV produce top-notch international news, providing fact-based but engaging coverage for Chinese viewers. But gradually he learned that the Chinese media wanted journalists who would listen and not challenge the authority of the government.
Zheng has particular sympathy for Cheng Lei, the Australian-Chinese anchor for Global TV, who has been charged with “illegally providing state secrets overseas. He said it was outrageous that the Chinese government was acting arbitrarily towards people of Chinese descent such as Cheng Lei, denying her many basic legal rights, “as if she were the property of the Chinese government.”
Zheng agreed with the decision to ban Global TV from the UK. He said that Western countries should have set certain standards for the quality of Globe TV’s reporting and the transparency of its financial and operational structure, and that if there were any violations, Globe TV should be punished.
Voice of America emailed two of its news contacts at Globe TV to get a response, but no response had been received by press time. VOA also emailed 12 journalism professors at the Communication University of China to get their views on the news environment in China, but most of the emails were returned and the rest were not responded to. A journalism professor at Renmin University of China declined to be interviewed by VOA.
The Threat of China’s Great Outreach
Huang Zhaonian, an assistant professor at the Institute of National Development at National Chengchi University in Taipei, analyzed that in recent years, with the effects of globalization, threats to press freedom around the world are no longer limited to regimes or corporate consortia within the country, but more often come from beyond national borders, including from China, an authoritarian power with rising geopolitical and economic power.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Huang said China’s global disinformation campaign is based on its grand foreign propaganda, the spillover effect of an authoritarian control of the media.
He said that China leads the government by the party and the media by the government, requiring the media to be surnamed the party and serve the Communist Party in the country, rather than the public interest. Now, through the official Party media and the external expansion of China’s online trio, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, the Chinese government has been able to extend its internal control over the media beyond its borders, whether through mergers and acquisitions of local media (the so-called “borrow the boat and go to sea” strategy), or by offering advertising fees to local media or using the Chinese market as an inducement to Whether through mergers and acquisitions of local media (the so-called “borrow the boat and go to sea” strategy), or by offering advertising fees to local media or using the Chinese market as an inducement to threaten and entice local media, the Chinese government is seeking to find more foreign media collaborators to help China penetrate a democratic and open society and expand its international influence.
It’s asymmetrical,” says Huang Zhaonian. So, China’s influence can go all over the world, but then, the capital of the free world, the information of the free world cannot enter China.”
In response to this asymmetric development, Huang said that countries in Europe and the United States, including Taiwan, have begun to counteract or make reasonable and prudent management of capital and information from China. He said there are three levels of management, including, first, the government inter-ministerial will strictly review the Chinese investment in the media, in addition to the regulation of the journalism profession, national security is also one of the criteria for review. For example, the media that are agents of foreign governments or regimes should be publicly disclosed to the public, so that the right to choose can be returned to the public. Third, the social media should be held responsible for labeling or reporting false information.
Huang said he agreed with the theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day, “Treating Information as a Public Good. He said information is not only a public good, but academics see it as a “coordination good,” or a product that promotes coordination. Because the right information helps facilitate communication and coordination in a democratic society, he said, it can be used to make good judgments and even to promote collective action. But China does not want to give civil society the opportunity to think independently, nor does it want to see collective action in society, so in addition to suppressing freedom of the press, it is also suppressing such information and coordination inside and outside the country.
Such developments, he said, have a negative impact on democratic countries. Huang said, “The Chinese Communist regime has eroded domestic coordination and public wealth and is now expanding outward. It’s not only eating up domestic public money and coordination money, it’s starting to eat up public money and coordination money around the world. That will result in the weakening of democracy and the expansion of authoritarian power, which is very detrimental, in a geopolitical context, to the competition between authoritarian power and democracy, which will put democracy in jeopardy and allow the further expansion of authoritarian power.”
Recent Comments