MCLC: Chinese censorship reaching overseas

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Timothy J.T. Pi <timothy.pi at gmail.com>
Subject: Chinese censorship reaching overseas
***********************************************************

Source: Global Public Square Blog, CNN (10/28/13):
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/28/how-chinese-censorship-i
s-reaching-overseas/

How Chinese censorship is reaching overseas
By Sarah Cook, Special to CNN
The Cable News Network (USA)

The efforts of China’s leaders to prevent its citizens from circulating
information inconvenient to the ruling Communist Party are well known. But
while censorship is a daily reality for media outlets inside mainland
China, their counterparts abroad are increasingly finding themselves under
pressure as well.

China’s leaders, it seems, have become more ambitious in their attempts to
control the news.

Take last year, when reports surfaced that China’s ambassador to the
United States met with Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief to try to persuade the
outlet not to run a story about the finances of Communist Party leader Xi
Jinping’s family. Last May, meanwhile, popular Taiwanese talk show host
Cheng Hung-yi resigned after station executives allegedly tried to stop
his program from touching on topics sensitive to Beijing. And back in
2011, reportedly at Beijing’s urging, a court in Hanoi sentenced two
Vietnamese citizens who practice Falun Gong to prison for transmitting
radio broadcasts about human rights abuses and corruption from their farm
to listeners in China.

These are far from the only examples of how the Chinese Communist Party’s
media controls extend past China’s borders, in a push documented in a
report published last week by the Center for International Media
Assistance, which examines a range of media outlets based outside China,
from major international media to local outlets in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America and elsewhere. And the findings are clear: the “China Factor”
looms over newsrooms across the globe.

As the report notes, the pressure has sometimes been overt, with Chinese
officials impeding independent reporting by barring foreign correspondents
from the sites of significant incidents, pressuring senior executives not
to publish content, or simply refusing to issue visas.

But more common – and arguably more effective – has been the carrot and
stick approach that induces subtle self-censorship among media owners and
outlets. Those perceived as friendly to Beijing might, for example, be
rewarded with advertising, access to Chinese audiences, lucrative
contracts for non-media enterprises, and even political appointments.
Those deemed too critical can face not just visa restrictions for
reporters, but lost advertising and blocked websites. As a result, some
outlets have become increasingly wary over covering “hot button” issues
such as the persecution of Tibetans, Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners.

Indirect pressure can also be applied via proxies, including advertisers,
satellite firms, and foreign governments, with out-of-favor outlets likely
to be boycotted or have their transmission signals cut.

Thus, it has not only been media organizations themselves that have moved
to restrict access to information. Earlier this month, CNN reported that
Apple had been accused of “kowtowing to the Chinese government” after
“pulling from its China App Store a product enabling users to circumvent
firewalls and access restricted sites.” This wasn’t the first time since
2011 that Apple had removed apps that people in China used to access
independent overseas Chinese media or bookstores.

A more extreme example of how Western businesses can get caught in the
middle of transnational Chinese censorship occurred in 2007. Last year, a
WikiLeaks cable suggested that Chinese security officials had summoned and
interrogated NASDAQ’s chief representative in China, U.S. citizen Lawrence
Pan.

According to the cable, the questioning focused on a journalist who had
been reporting from the exchange’s New York headquarters for New Tang
Dynasty Television (NTDTV), an outlet founded by Falun Gong practitioners
in the United States to broadcast news and cultural programming to Chinese
audiences. The cable added that Pan, “to secure his release, may have
pledged to Chinese authorities that NASDAQ would no longer allow” such
access. Indeed, starting in February 2007, NTDTV’s correspondent was
suddenly barred from the building after reporting from there on a daily
basis for more than a year.

Some international companies have been more proactive in their assistance
to Chinese censors. In 2008, Reporters Without Borders released the
transcript of a telephone recording in which a representative of the
French satellite company Eutelsat admitted that the firm had cut the
signal of that same television station to “show a good gesture to the
Chinese government.”

While some of these dynamics date back to the 1990s, they have intensified
and expanded over the past five years. Physical assaults against foreign
reporters in China have become more violent, while Beijing’s efforts to
influence newsroom decisions in Hong Kong have intensified, expanding to
topics touching on the territory’s internal politics. In Taiwan,
meanwhile, self-censorship is increasing, as media owners seek new sources
of revenue from mainland entities. And major Western news outlets have
found themselves facing the kinds of restrictions – including wholesale
website blocking and intrusive cyber-attacks – usually reserved for
dissident Chinese websites.

The paradoxical combination of the Communist Party feeling emboldened
internationally and insecure domestically has only fueled this trend. With
more than half of China’s population now accessing the Internet, and with
some political content going viral despite domestic censors’ efforts, the
Party’s nervousness of overseas news trickling in has increased.

These dynamics have a damaging real-world impact. For international
audiences, the information targeted for censorship includes topics that
have global implications, such as human rights abuses, high-level
corruption, and environmental pollution. For Chinese, the stakes are even
higher. Overseas media outlets offer a vital source of information on
matters with life-or-death consequences and a precious forum for debating
the past, present, and future of their country.

Still, there are clear limits to Beijing’s reach. Media outlets around the
world daily put out news that the Communist Party would likely prefer
unreported, while journalists, activists, owners, and independent courts
have pushed back against pressure and scored some important victories. The
result is a complex and ever-changing negotiation over where the “red
line” lies.

As China's international role expands, this transnational tug-of-war will
become more important. Supporters of media freedom – be they journalists,
policymakers, or news consumers – must therefore develop an open-eyed
strategy for protecting and expanding the free flow of information about
one of the world’s most prominent nations.

Editor’s note: Sarah Cook is a senior research analyst for East Asia at
Freedom House and author of report The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship,
which was released October 22 by the National Endowment for Democracy’s
Center for International Media Assistance. The views expressed are her own.