Chinese Stranglehold

Twenty leading blog service providers in China, including Yahoo.cn and MSN.cn, have signed a “self-discipline pact” to end anonymous blogging. People use computers at an internet cafe in Suining, southwest China's Sichuan province, January 11, 2007. Under the new pact, blog service providers in China are being “encouraged” to register users under their real names and contact information before...

The Chinese government’s announced crackdown on “false news” and “illegal news coverage” could be yet another direct threat to media freedom in China, Human Rights Watch has said. The crackdown adds to the Chinese government’s existing arsenal of vaguely-worded prohibitions, such as laws against “spreading rumours,” which help stifle independent reporting through the threat of serious legal...

One year before the 2008 Olympics open in Beijing, the Chinese government is violating commitments on media freedom it made to the International Olympics Committee by continuing to harass, intimidate and detain foreign journalists and their local colleagues, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. In this video image released by Students for a Free Tibet, Canadian Tibet supporters...

A US congressional committee plans to investigate whether Yahoo Inc lied during testimony over its role in a human rights case in China that sent journalist Shi Tao to jail for 10 years. Announcing the investigation, House of Representatives foreign affairs committee chairman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, Friday last it would be shameful if it was confirmed that Yahoo had known why the...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the government’s political exploitation of the fact that a much-commented TV report about pork buns made with cardboard supposedly turned out to have been fabricated. The authorities have used it to launch a campaign against fake news reports with "heavy penalties" for the journalists responsible. "Journalist Zi Beijia’s arrest has enabled the institutions...

New York, July 23, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for greater transparency in the arrest of a Chinese reporter accused of fabricating news. Police arrested Beijing TV reporter Zi Beijia last week and are holding him in criminal custody following accusations that he faked a report on contaminated steamed buns, according to state news reports. “Whether or not Zi Beijia was guilty of...

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...