Ways That Are Dark

In a sure sign of temerity and unabashed certainty of their moral right, China has lashed out at western media for its bias. As Howard French puts it in the International Herald Tribune:

The Chinese press is similarly full of claims of Western media bias and distortion, a charge made straight-faced in a country that routinely blocks foreign media, strictly censors its own news, and has only allowed the media to cover street violence by Tibetans.

Read the complete article: Rejecting dissent, China exposes its candor gap

China already has by most accounts the strictest Internet controls in the world. Its monitoring and filtering techniques have been described as a panopticon and nicknamed The Great Firewall of China. Now according to Reporters Sans Frontieres and the China Human Rights Defenders group, control of the Internet in China is yet again being tightened.

Censorship of the internet in China is becoming more draconian, according to new details of Beijing’s online restrictions published by human rights organisations.

The report also said that the punishments meted out to those who are deemed to have transgressed Beijing’s rules are becoming more drastic.

The complete article in The Guardian is China tightens control of net.

I’ve been following the adventures of Greg and Francie, who are traveling around the world and blogging about it. They spent several months in China and visited numerous places. I was glad that Greg rounded up this part of the journey with an intelligent and thoughtful 5 Things I Loved And hated About China.

Excellent stuff!

This is a short follow up on the Chinese government’s directive to local media that all news must be good news. The new rules are adding more pressure to the already challenging job of copying and pasting articles from Reuters.

The task is not always easy, as one episode showed during ceremonies Aug. 8 marking the one-year countdown to the Beijing Games.

The government-run China Daily ran an item on its Web site that evening pointing out that the site of the festivities, Tiananmen Square, was also the place where in 1989 the People’s Liberation Army crushed pro-democracy demonstrators, killing many. The item — true but touching on a subject banned from Chinese newspapers — was taken down the next morning and an investigation was launched. The author, colleagues said, had lifted the sentence directly from the Reuters news agency in a copy-and-paste maneuver common in Chinese journalism.

The offending journalist was suspended without pay for a month and fined the equivalent of $133, they said.

The above cut and pasted from The Washington Post article: Chinese Media Told to Play Up Positives of Traffic Test.

The Guardian reports in All news must be good news, says Chinese government that local media have been ordered to only report positive news stories in the build up to October’s 17th party congress. That means coverage of ongoing food and safety scandals, including the recent collapse of a bridge in Hunan province that killed over 40 people are off limits.

This makes one question what exactly will be discussed at the party congress. If the media can’t discuss real problems facing the country, will the government leaders have time to talk about them? The most important aspect of the upcoming congress will be the expected unveiling of the next generation of national leaders in a politburo reshuffle.

China has one of the world’s largest parliaments, with about 3000 delegates. Parliament meets for about two weeks a year.