State Control

More than 1,000 journalists have visited Guantanamo Bay since the U.S. military began locking up suspected al-Qaida and Taliban militants there 4 1/2 years ago. But access has been severely restricted: Journalists could not talk to detainees, they had to be accompanied by a military escort and their photos were censored. Now, the Pentagon has shut down access entirely - at least temporarily -...

Google has admitted for the first time that it compromised its principles when it entered the Chinese market and agreed to toe Beijing’s strict line on censorship. Speaking in Washington, Sergey Brin, Google’s billionaire co-founder, said the company, which operates under the motto "do no evil", had adopted "a set of rules that we weren’t comfortable with". In a hint that Google could adjust its...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned the current unprecedented level of Internet filtering in China, which means the Google.com search engine can no longer be accessed in most provinces - although the censored Chinese version, Google.cn, is still accessible - and software designed in the United States to get round censorship now only works with great difficulty. The organisation...

SHANGHAI: It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of...

The newspaper of Tuanjie, which means unity, celebrated its 50th anniversary on Friday. It was founded by China's non-communist party the Revolutionary Committee of Chinese Kuomintang. First published in 1956, the Tuanjie newspaper was shut down during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). It resumed publishing in 1980 and is sold overseas. The paper, which later developed into the voice of non...

(RSF/IFEX) - The Public Security Bureau's formal refusal on 17 May 2006 to allow detained blogger and documentary filmmaker Hao Wu access to a lawyer on national security grounds is "absurd," Reporters Without Borders has said, as Hao began his fourth month in detention. "Hao's case is emblematic of the PSB's methods," the press freedom organisation said. "It is farcical to treat this blogger as a...

SAN DIEGO--Hu Shuli, editor of the Beijing-based Caijing Magazine, says without fail she is asked some version of the same question each time she travels abroad. "What is taboo for Chinese journalists?" "Foreign journalists pay too much attention to what is taboo in China" Hu says. "We don't pay attention to it. There are so many important news stories. If a story's important enough, we'll find a...

BEIJING -- A freelance writer was sentenced to 12 years in prison yesterday, receiving an unusually harsh penalty amid one of China's most severe media crackdowns since the 1980s. The sentencing of Yang Tianshui on subversion charges was one of a flurry of court actions yesterday against Chinese reporters. In Beijing, prosecutors filed a new indictment against a Chinese researcher for The New York...

The organisation regretted that "China was marking the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution by censoring the Internet and cracking down on democrats", pointing to a 12-year jail term against a cyberdissident and closure of a pollster website. Yang Tianshui was sentenced on 16 May 2006 to 12 years in prison for posting anti-government articles online. Elsewhere a website, Polls (Zhongguo...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has condemned the physical attacks which five Chinese journalists sustained at the hands of mine employees and security guards on 7 and 8 May 2006 while trying to cover an accident in the Meihe coal mine in the northeastern province of Jilin. "As well as having to cope with government censorship, China's journalists are increasingly subject to physical...