MCLC: censoring censorship remarks

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: censoring censorship remarks
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (3/7/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/censors-hit-delete-on-a-part
y-chiefs-censorship-remarks/

Censors Hit Delete on a Party Chief’s Censorship Remarks
By EDWARD WONG 

The question runs through the minds of many Chinese microblog users: What
catches the eye of an online censor on any given day?

It seems that comments on microblogs about Internet censorship, even by
senior Communist Party officials, can fall prey to the delete button.

On Thursday, the microblog account of Caijing, a respected news magazine,
posted a statement that Zhang Chunxian, the party chief of Xinjiang, the
troubled western region, had made to journalists in Beijing earlier that
day. Mr. Zhang had been asked by reporters after a meeting of the National
People’s Congress about the rising number of violent episodes in Xinjiang,
often involving ethnic Uighurs, who are Turkic-speaking Muslims, and the
majority ethnic Han.

Mr. Zhang said that 90 percent of “violent terrorists” use a VPN, a
virtual private network, to get around China’s Internet censorship system
and watch videos that inspire them to carry out attacks. The censorship
system, often called the Great Firewall, blocks a wide range of websites,
including ones with political content deemed sensitive, but it can be
circumvented.

On its microblog, Caijing posted Mr. Zhang’s statement above his
photograph. The post went up around 8:30 p.m. Thursday. But by Friday, it
had been deleted, along with the 27 users’ comments under it, according to
Free Weibo <https://freeweibo.com/weibo/3685222966914213>, an organization
that documents Internet censorship in China.

The Caijing microblog is hosted by Sina Corp., which has a popular
microblog platform. Sina and other companies that run microblog platforms
employ armies of internal staff censors to monitor posts and delete ones
they deem too sensitive so that the companies will not incur the wrath of
party officials.

But censors elsewhere did not seem bothered by Mr. Zhang’s remarks. On
Friday, Caijing’s own website carried an article about his comments,
without any apparent objection from party censors. The article had first
appeared in Jinghua Times, a Beijing newspaper, and was reprinted on the
websites of both Caijing and the Chinese-language edition of Global Times,
a state-run newspaper that strikes a nationalistic tone.

The English-language website of Global Times ran its own article
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/846775.shtml#.UxmE5_mSxSJ>on Mr.
Zhang’s remarks under the headline, “Terrorist attacks ‘part of trend.’”

That headline raises interesting questions in light of other articles by
Global Times this week.

Global Times did not explain in its article quoting Mr. Zhang why it had
put the phrase “part of trend” in quotation marks in the headline. Some
readers might interpret the use of the quotation marks to mean that the
newspaper was skeptical of Mr. Zhang’s judgment. Earlier this week, Global
Times and other state news organizations angrily accused CNN, the American
television news network, of undue skepticism over the Chinese government’s
explanation of a deadly knife attack in the city of Kunming because the
headline on a CNN online article had the word “terrorists” in quotation
marks.

The state media editorials criticizing CNN have fanned distrust of Western
journalists among many Chinese.

The editorial 
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/845995.shtml#.UxmEafmSxSI> in Global
Times, which ran on Monday, said: “CNN has tiptoed around the Kunming
attack by putting quotation marks around the word terrorists. Its
long-claimed neutrality hinted at its partiality to terrorists.”

“It is more than obvious that the latest incident is a terrorist attack
and there is no room for their double standards,” it added. “CNN is
messing with political ideologies and has crossed the bottom line of media
ethics.”

Bree Feng contributed research.