MCLC: state narrative on HK protests

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state narrative on HK protests
Source: Channel News Asia (10/1/14): http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/hk-demos-throw-beijing/1390978.html
Different pictures painted of Hong Kong #OccupyCentral protests
Swelling pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have been painted in a supportive light in the global media – quite different from the narrative told in China.
By Jeremy Goldkorn
Pro-democracy protesters gather at a rally in the Causeway Bay area of Hong Kong. (AFP/Alex Ogle)
BEIJING: Scenes of the massive, yet peaceful, protests that have taken over the streets of Hong Kong – the former British colony that is now a Special Administrative Region of China – are being flashed around the world, where the reaction has been mostly supportive of the demonstrators.
On the Chinese mainland, however, the media tells a different narrative – one in which the protesters are “violent”, “extreme” and being manipulated by foreign forces. A front page story on the protests in Monday’s Chinese-language edition of the Global Times tabloid showed not scenes of demonstrators being tear-gassed at close range, but rather rows of police officers trying to keep a surging crowd of protesters at bay.
News has adhered strictly to the party line – including on social media. “There’s very little information aside from the official point of view that you can find that lasts very long,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei, a Beijing-based firm that tracks Chinese media and Internet. “That doesn’t mean that people don’t know what’s going on, but the messaging is being controlled quite strictly.”
The photo-sharing app Instagram has been blocked in mainland China since Sunday night when the protests escalated. That put the popular platform in the company of other foreign social media including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, already banned in the country’s tightly-controlled cyber space.
SPECTRE OF 1989
Assistant Professor Fu King-wa at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre and founder of the censorship-tracking website Weiboscope, said that the number of posts deleted from the popular microblogging site Weibo by mainland censors since Saturday has hit a record high.
Prof Fu’s website – which tracks a daily sample of 50,000 to 60,000 postings from popular microbloggers – found that 98 posts per 10,000 were blocked on Saturday, 152 on Sunday at the height of the Hong Kong clashes, and 136 on Monday. “This is the highest in 2014 – even higher than Jun 4 (the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident), even higher than some of the trials of the human rights lawyers, and also higher than some of the other social movements in China,” Prof Fu said, referring to the past year’s civil society clampdown under President Xi Jinping.
The main driver behind Beijing’s concern, he said, is likely the flurry of comparisons between the current Hong Kong demonstrations and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, during which hundreds – by some estimates, more than a thousand – people died after authorities sent tanks to crush demonstrations in the heart of Beijing. “That triggers the nerves of the censors, of the government.”
In an editorial this week, the Global Times blasted such comparisons as “groundless” and argued that China “now has more feasible approaches to deal with varied disturbances”.
GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA
In addition to targeting social media, there have been recent additions to a growing list of websites now blocked in the country, including the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which has reported extensively on the protests.
Free speech advocates have voiced alarm over the recent clampdown, which the anti-censorship group GreatFire.org said represents possibly the highest-ever volume of new website blocks in China. “I imagine not since the launch of the Great Firewall itself have so many sites been added to the blocked list over such a short period of time,” said a GreatFire.org co-founder who goes by the pseudonym Charlie Smith, referring to China’s Internet censorship regime.
Whether China is able to continue keeping a lid on the developments in Hong Kong largely depends on whether authorities use force to end the protests, analysts said. “It would create a need to explain what happened, but the international outrage and coverage if there were a violent end to these protests would be very difficult to contain,” Goldkorn said.
- AFP/nd
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 1, 2014
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