CHINA PLANS "SMOKELESS WAR" AGAINST PRESS, DISSIDENTS
26 September 2005

In a high-level Communist party meeting, China's president Hu Jintao has reportedly called for an intensive crackdown on media liberties. While China's government has sought to project an image of a more market-oriented, open system, it continues to forbid basic press freedoms and still persecutes journalists at an alarming rate.

Reporters without Borders (RSF), a Paris-based NGO working to protect press freedom and the safety of journalists reports that China imprisons more journalists than any other nation. On 23 September RSF reported growing concern for the safety of Zhang Lin, a "cyber-dissident" imprisoned in January for "endangering national security".

Mr. Zhang launched a hunger strike on 1 September, in protest of ongoing "mistreatment" and forced labor he has undergone while in detention at Bengbu prison. According to RSF, nothing is known about him since 8 September. It is known he was taken to hospital one week into his protest but returned to prison after "refusing treatment". His wife has been barred from seeing him, because, authorities explained "all detainees must be cut off from the exterior".

In the words of the RSF report:

Zhang was convicted by a Bengbu court on 29 July for giving an interview to a foreign radio station and for posting articles and essays (including the words of a punk song) on the Internet. The court found that their content was "contrary to the bases of the constitution" and "endangered national security."

In May, China imprisoned a Hong Kong reporter writing for foreign news agencies on charges of threatening national security. The reporter Ching Cheong faces the death penalty for what amount to political charges designed to inhibit the free flow of information.

Mr. Ching is actually accused of spying for foreign intelligence agencies, essentially for doing the work reporters do. His detention is an example of China's ongoing resistance to any uncomfortable revelations about its government or its policies.

Despite the heavy, nationwide and international criticism it incurred for attempts to obscure the outbreak of SARS, which led to deaths in a number of countries, and a resulting campaign to appear more tolerant, Chinese authorities have continued to attack and obstruct members of the press. With corruption rampant, often ranking among top concerns in polls, China's assault on the press clearly serves the interests of corrupt officials and those who seek only to retain a hold on power.

According to the BBC, China's "state-controlled Xinhua news agency said that in 2001, the Communist Party investigated more than 175,000 of its officials for corruption".

Revealing how China has pushed its war on press freedom, smokeless or not, further afield, a New York Times researcher, Zhao Yan, marked one year in custody on 16 September, imprisoned for revealing "state secrets". Astonishingly, Mr. Zhao is accused of nothing more than revealing to an American newspaper that Jiang Zemin would retire, before the official announcement.

Strange a national anti-press policy which also seeks to dictate at all times, on all issues, when precisely news will be revealed, even once it is already decided. China's officials quite simply wish to disallow useful information from reaching the public in a timely way. Through information, they seek to control and repress.

Though state censorship in the case of the SARS outbreak cost lives, and could be treated as a criminal offense against the innocent citizens of other nations who lost their lives, China's officials persist in their desire to wield absolute control over the information environment available to more than 20 percent of the world's population.

Earlier this month, RSF and Human Rights in China urged fmr. US pres. Bill Clinton to raise the issue of the case of jailed journalist Shi Tao. Shi was jailed for allegedly passing state secrets to foreigners, and was convicted after Yahoo! Holdings (a Hong Kong affiliate of search engine company Yahoo!) passed private e-mail account information to Chinese authorities.

Pres. Hu's declaration of a "smokeless war" on the press now puts the international community in a very tight bind: firms, affiliates and representatives of companies based in free societies will be asked, on an ever-grander scale, to collaborate in gestapo tactics against free individuals in their own environment. Mr. Hu's new enterprise should not be treated as new or as harmless, however quixotic it may seem, however much Sinophiles may wish to see it as a "softening" of rhetoric.

It is a direct threat to international standards of press freedom and to the fundamental structure of a free society. Businesses working in China must consider how closely to collaborate with China's crackdown on dissidents, and internet firms, lusting for a slice of China's massive and still largely untapped markets, must consider whether they want to undermine the very premise of their existence as innovative, liberal businesses, protected by the necessary press freedoms inherent in a free society. [For more: Guardian]