China

Reporters Without Borders today condemned a purge of staff last week at Minzhu yu Fazhi Shibao (Democracy and Legal Times), a weekly specialising in legal news that is considered to be one of China’s ten most influential newspapers. "Censorship takes different forms in China," the press freedom organisation said. "Closures of websites, blogs or newspapers are the most visible of the many press...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned a ban on the online publication China Development Brief and warned diplomats and investors in China of a growing censorship of socio-economic news, preventing any reliable assessment of the real state of the country. The Beijing Statistics Bureau and the Public Security Bureau on 4 July ordered the site’s founder Nick Young to halt publication. The...

BEIJING (AFP) - In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, "citizen journalism" is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in. A letter posted on...

The mother of a Chinese journalist thrown in jail after US Internet giant Yahoo provided user information to the Chinese government arrived in Washington Thursday to campaign for her son’s release. “There is a lot of international concern, it is not an isolated case now,” Gao Qinsheng told AFP after meeting her American lawyer and the Washington representative of Reporters Without Borders, a press...

Yahoo shareholders have vetoed with an overwhelming majority the company's proposed Chinese anti-censorship policy. This comes close on the heels of the mother of jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao announcing plans to continue with the lawsuit against Yahoo. Proposals to set up a human rights committee with the task of reviewing Yahoo’s policies around the world, specifically in China, were also...

A jailed Chinese reporter accused of leaking state secrets has joined a U.S. lawsuit claiming Yahoo Inc. helped the Chinese government convict dissidents, his mother said Sunday. Shi Tao, who was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison, is seeking compensation from the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet company, claiming Yahoo Hong Kong and Yahoo China provided information to the Chinese...

A newspaper in southwest China has sacked three of its editors over an advertisement saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. A young clerk with no knowledge of the Tiananmen massacre allowed a tribute to victims to slip into the classifieds page of the Chengdu Evening News, a newspaper in south-west China, the South China Morning Post reported. The tiny ad on...

BEIJING (Reuters) - An advertisement saluting mothers of students and workers killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown appeared in a newspaper in southwest China on Monday, two witnesses said, in a rare public criticism of the massacre. The advertisement, in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News, read: "Paying tribute to the strong mothers of June 4 victims", two local...

New York, June 4, 2007—A Nanjing-based reporter whose online video, audio, and written news reports had angered authorities is in police custody today along with his wife, according to his employer at the U.S.-based news Web site Boxun News. Following the May 30 arrest, police accused Sun Lin (known by his pen name Jie Mu) of illegally possessing weapons and heading a criminal gang. "We are...

Reporters Without Borders voiced concern today about the action of the Chinese foreign ministry in summoning and warning two western journalists about their reporting from Tibet last month, and it called on Beijing Olympic Games organiser Liu Qi to clarify the status of Tibet in the new rules for foreign journalists. "The Beijing games organising committee has just published a very detailed report...