[Editor’s Note: OJR today welcomes Kim Pearson as its newest contributing writer. Kim, who also blogs at Professor Kim’s News Notes and BlogHer, teaches journalism and interactive multimedia at The College of New Jersey. She’ll be covering legal issues, including press freedom, for OJR.]
Chinese blogger and filmmaker Hao Wu isn’t making public statements about the 140 days he spent imprisoned in China. Wu, a Chinese citizen with US permanent residency, was released from prison July 11 after an international campaign by Wu’s sister, his fellow bloggers and human rights activists. Chinese security services officials did not disclose the reasons for Wu’s arrest or the conditions of his release.
Wu’s associates believe that the government was interested in his tapes and notes for a documentary he was making about China’s underground Christian churches. They say those materials were taken from his Beijing apartment shortly after his arrest.
Wu’s reticence is understandable. Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom report on China paints a dire picture of the state of free speech and thought in the world’s most populous nation. According to RSF, in an effort to contain “growing social unrest, the government has chosen to impose a news blackout. The press has been forced into self-censorship, the Internet purged and foreign media kept at a distance.”
RSF says about 50 reporters are currently imprisoned for writing about subjects the government has deemed sensitive. The latest is Zan Aizong, 37, a reporter for a government-controlled newspaper, who was jailed August 1 after he posted reports on the Internet about Chinese Christians who had been arrested after a peaceful protest.
Despite the continuing dangers, some observers were quick to call Wu’s release a victory for bloggers. In a July 25th column for New America Media, Eugenia Chien wrote,
“[Wu’s] case is a testament to the power of the blogging community to generate information and gather support. With an estimated 60 million bloggers in China, blogs have become a powerful tool of social support for causes ranging from feminism to freedom of speech.”
Frank Dai, who blogged alongside Wu on the Global Voices website, isn’t so sure. In an email exchange with this writer, he said, “I would rather take Wu’s release as an individual event which is not closely related to blogosphere… However I think those voices help call attention from large organizations such as RSF [Reporters Without Borders] to this matter and thus maybe accelerate this process.”
The use of blogs and Internet websites to disseminate news that the Chinese government would prefer to see repressed reflects a pattern that goes back to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, says Jia-yan Mi, assistant professor of English and Modern Languages at The College of New Jersey. China’s economic opening to the West has led to the proliferation of communications technologies that Chinese citizens have increasingly used to tell their stories to the outside world. For almost two decades now, the world has learned about such events and issues as pro-democracy protests, the AIDS, SARS and bird-flu epidemics, cries for religious freedom, and the growing gap between rich and poor from Chinese reporters operating without government sanction.
That paradox is a source of anxiety for many Chinese government leaders, according to Mi and other observers. Government leaders relish the wealth that communications technologies make possible, but fear that allowing public debate about China’s social problems will create a crisis on a par with the bad old days of Mao’s cultural revolution or the breakup of former Soviet Union. Mi also said that some conservatives often suspect that much of what looks like grass-roots expression by Chinese citizens is really the result of manipulation by Western powers. “The government still cannot recognize the benefit of disclosing information to the general public,” says Dai.
As a graduate student at Beijing University, Mi participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. He remembers how students used fax machines, early cell phones and walkie-talkies to present their demands for political democracy, and how the world was galvanized by the international media’s broadcasts of the massive protests and the brutal government crackdown on June 4 that killed as many as 3,000 and injured hundreds more. “People say the post-modern telecommunications revolution started from the Tiananmen Square incident,” Mi said.
Today, Mi added, Internet cafes, personal computers and cell phones are ubiquitous in China. Government censors’ efforts to block websites are routinely subverted by tech-savvy Chinese Internet users.
Human rights activist Xiao Qiang maintains that the spirit of the Tiananmen protests remains evident in the fact that Chinese citizens continue to express themselves, despite government opposition. In a June, 2006 New America Media interview, Qiang said, “The spirit of Tiananmen is about people speaking freely. Blogging in the broadest term — expressing yourself through the Internet — is ultimately about the same thing.”
In fact, Mi maintains that a visitor to China will have no trouble finding Chinese citizens who are willing to offer critical opinions about the government, economic affairs or a broad range of issues. For the most part, he said, people express their opinions without consequence – unless a government official concludes that the expression is part of an effort to organize some sort of anti-government movement.
But Dai contends that it’s a mistake to see Chinese bloggers as a movement of dissidents:
“The Chinese bloggers are not so different with bloggers from other countries. MySpace kids talk about pre-age love engagement and their Chinese counterparts emulate after them, posting their photos on the blogs. In addition, dissident bloggers exist in everywhere, regardless of its political ideology of that particular country.”
Dai is part of the Social Brain Foundation, organizers of the second annual Chinese bloggers conference scheduled for end of October 28-29, 2006 in Hangzhou, Zheijang Province. Dai said the conference’s agenda is still in the planning stage but the goal is, “simply to provide a space for Chinese bloggers to know each other offline. It’s not so academic and serious.”
For Dai, Chinese blogs, are a “very intriguing method to enter into the thinking, life style, culture and psychological conflict of modern Chinese people in a fast changing social environment because it helps amplify the voice of ordinary citizens.” Still, Dai says that even the most apolitical of Chinese bloggers writes with the awareness that in a country without the legal infrastructure to protect free speech, even content that is intended to be inoffensive might be seen as violating a taboo. He says,
“Blogging is not totally virtual. The bloggers are real persons in flesh and bone. So I think that the time for bloggers to speak freely would be also the time when speech freedom is protected by the law and institution and regarded as an unalienable right as a human being. Unless the government learns how to deal with its dissenting voices properly in an civilized manner, the free expression will never occur in the blogosphere.”
