In 1988...

Since 1949, Chinese Communist Party policy on cultural expression and the press has oscillated from periods of liberalisation to periods of repression which in the period of Mao were violent… In early 1987 another government drive started the ‘Anti-Bourgeois Liberalisation’ policy. Although the eventual outcome of this campaign is far from clear, a number of its consequences are known. They include expulsion from the party of a number of writers, journalists and scientists and the banning of books and films. Some newspapers and scientific and literary journals have closed down. In May 1987, thirty-nine journals were shut in Guangxi province.

Virtually all press and broadcasting media in China are owned by the State and controlled by the Communist Party. Editors and reporters are, almost without exception, party members and are referred to as ‘Party cadres’. Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), the party’s chief official newspaper, has described the press as the party’s ‘loyal eyes, ears and tongue’ and as an ‘important bridge for dally contact between the party and the people’.

In 1986 the authorities seized 7,000,000 books and magazines specializing mostly in ‘yellow’ literature, such as the martial arts, and romantic and erotic themes.

During the riots in Tibet in October 1987, fifteen foreign correspondents and some tourists were asked to leave the area and return to the capital city. Read more...

In 2008...

Freedom of expression in contemporary China is in a state of flux. While pervasive and far-reaching limits on freedom of expression remain in place, commercialisation of the media and increased government tolerance of media freedom and individual expression have led to some progress on freedom of expression over the past two decades. At the same time, the rise of the Internet has meant that private citizens are better able to express their views about Chinese politics and society through a medium that, while heavily monitored and censored by the government, is impossible to control fully.

Progress has not yet been reflected in domestic law or Communist Party policy. As a result, both the Chinese media and the Chinese public are ill-served by State regulation, which guarantees neither that journalists will be protected from serious legal repercussions merely for doing their job nor that the public will have adequate access to information about what is going on in their own society. Nevertheless, in practice, the rise of privately owned media and greater professionalism among journalists has led to media coverage of the authorities.

Legal and Regulatory Framework

The three main bodies that regulate and oversee the media are the Central Propaganda Bureau (CPB), the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), and the State Administration of Radio, Television, and Film (SARFT). Both the GAPP and the SARFT are ministry-level government bureaux, while the CPB is a Communist Party body.

The CPB exercises perhaps the most significant and wide-ranging oversight of the day-to-day workings of the media and is responsible for setting and implementing the Communist Party’s media policy. The CPB views the media not as independent entities to be regulated by the State, but rather as organs of State power, with a positive obligation to serve the Party and preserve social stability. In order to achieve this goal, the CPB regularly issues orders to the media about what can and cannot be covered. Editors who fail to implement these orders fully risk immediate dismissal or, in rare cases of flagrant violation of CPB guidelines, criminal prosecution. The CPB often also issues censorship orders informally through phone calls to senior print and electronic media editors. This avoids any potentially embarrassing paper trail and makes a formal appeal – unlikely in any case – virtually impossible.

‘Media regulations issued by SARFT and GAPP control the media by strictly limiting who can produce and disseminate news and cultural products through a rigidly enforced licensing system.’

Media regulations issued by SARFT and GAPP control the media by strictly limiting who can produce and disseminate news and cultural products through a rigidly enforced licensing system. They are also responsible for prohibiting certain content, including any content that endangers State security, that is contrary to the basic principles of the Constitution, or that harms the country’s ethnic unity.

The government, concerned about losing its grip over information and expression, has made the Internet subject to licensing requirements and content restriction rules found in other areas of Chinese media regulation. The key regulatory agency for the Internet is the Ministry of Information Industry (MII). Under MII regulations, most websites that report or disseminate news or provide cultural products must register with the government, and can only begin operation after obtaining explicit government approval. MII regulations also set high barriers to starting a commercial website, including significant registered capital and personnel requirements that must be met before launching a site. Individual ‘netizens’ who operate their own, non-commercial websites have also been burdened with registration requirements, and the government has taken steps to prohibit individuals from posting content anonymously online.

In addition to registration requirements and content restrictions, individual authors, journalists and editors have to contend with provisions of the criminal law, including overly broad provisions that prohibit the disclosure of State secrets or endangering State security. The government has repeatedly used the criminal law to punish individuals merely for exercising their right to freedom of expression and has repeatedly rejected calls from the international community to bring its State secrets laws and criminal law into conformity with international standards.

Although there has been little progress in reforming existing laws, a number of progressive editors, journalists and scholars have succeeded on one or two occasions in preventing the enactment of proposed new laws that would have imposed further limits. A proposed anti-sedition law was dropped in March 2007 and, in June 2007, a law on crisis management was abandoned which would have imposed heavy fines for failing to follow the official line when reporting on certain emergencies, including floods and other natural disasters.

Perhaps the only recent positive development was the issuing, in April 2007, of national-level regulations on open government information, due to come into force on 1 May 2008. However, major exceptions – including a prohibition on disclosure of information related to ‘State secrets’ and the omission of a general principle in favour of disclosure – cast doubt on how effective these rules will be.

In late 2006, the Chinese government also pledged to rescind – at least temporarily – restrictions on foreign journalists as a gesture toward greater openness in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Travel and other restrictions on the international media were lifted between 1 January 2007 and 17 October 2008, although these do not apply to Chinese journalists, even those working for international media. Within months of the new rules coming into effect, the government began to backtrack, denying foreign reporters access to certain areas including Tibet, the China-North Korea border and villages in central Henan province, which is particularly hard-hit by HIV/AIDS.

Political Expression

There are no opposition political parties in China, and no elections other than at the grassroots level. However, local civil society groups, though still tightly controlled and heavily regulated, have been making more active use of the broadcast and print media, issuing reports on subjects as diverse as environmental protection, legal reform and public health. As non-governmental organisations continue to proliferate and become more sophisticated, a key test of free expression in China will be whether these groups will be allowed to offer detailed and meaningful public critiques of government policy and performance, and whether they will be allowed to engage in real advocacy on the basis of their own research and reporting.

News Media

The media landscape in China is characterised by a large number of media outlets, although the numbers remain small in comparison to the huge population. Recent statistics indicate that there are around 2,000 newspapers, 8,000 magazines, more than 700 non-cable television stations, both national and local, and some 2,000 cable television stations. Major print media outlets, including the Beijing-based Caijing, a twice-monthly finance magazine, and Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend, are generally regarded as having more political space to operate than their electronic media counterparts. Despite increased government surveillance, news magazine shows such as Focus and News Probe, both broadcast on China Central Television, have found a wide-ranging audience with their investigative reports on local corruption, abuse of power and political malfeasance.

In recent years, regional markets outside Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have begun to see the emergence of daily newspapers that, following in the footsteps of their higher-profile coastal counterparts, produce a more hard-hitting, more commercial product likely to appeal to a broader readership. Such papers, including Xi’an’s China Business News (Hua Shang Bao) and Chengdu’s West China Metropolitan News (Hua Xi Du Shi Bao), are thought to be financially successful, but publicly available information about their finances is extremely limited.

The dominant media in China are still largely State-owned, but many of China’s main media outlets function as profit-making public enterprises. They therefore need to produce content that the public will pay for, which requires them to be less propaganda-oriented than the totally State-controlled media. A small handful of elite media outlets have attracted investment from private sources, further strengthening their independence from the government while at the same time increasing their incentive to make money.

Many of the stories put out by the commercialised media generate pressure for change. In April 2003, for example, a front-page report in the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily on the suspicious death in custody of 27-year-old graphic designer Sun Zhigang eventually led to the repeal of administrative detention procedures known as ‘custody and repatriation’. In 2005 and 2006, media reports on the executions of apparently innocent defendants contributed to procedural reforms in the application of the death penalty.

Increased competition and commercialisation have also led to decisions about news being subjected to business considerations. For many newspapers, the lack of a subsidy means not only that content must be interesting enough that readers will pay for it, but also that the interests of key advertisers must be taken into account as well as the preservation of government relationships. On the positive side, the higher journalistic standards of many market-oriented media outlets has created some space for subsidised media outlets, such as the Worker’s Daily, to publish more hard-hitting investigative reports, rather than merely continuing to produce similar output and live off government subsidies.

New Technologies

There is no doubt that the rise of the Internet in China has created opportunities for free expression and the circulation of information that were not previously available. China has the largest number of Internet users in the world and Chinese is the second most common language on the worldwide web, after English.

Despite the government’s constant attempts to monitor, block and remove content, individual Chinese continue to use the Internet to express themselves, access foreign news sources and trade ideas with their fellow citizens. Blogging has taken the country by storm, drawing in technologically adept teenagers and elite academics alike. Many activists have begun to use the Internet as a tool for political action, posting information about their work online. Although websites are generally forbidden from collecting and reporting news on their own, and are instead limited to posting news stories that have already appeared in print, a few media outlets have begun to experiment with reporting breaking stories directly online. The legality of straight-to-web reporting is in doubt and whether the government will allow it to continue remains to be seen.

Many ‘netizens’ posting sensitive material on the Internet see their postings removed by the government, while a few face severe repercussions. As of February 2006, 49 cyber-dissidents had been imprisoned for posting articles critical of the government online. Some Western companies, in particular Yahoo! and Google, have been accused of complicity in the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. In 2005, Shi Tao, an editor with the Changsha-based Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Commercial News), was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for providing information to an overseas pro-democracy website. It was later disclosed that Yahoo! had identified Shi Tao to Chinese security forces, supplying them with information crucial to his conviction. In June 2007, Shi Tao joined a US lawsuit against Yahoo!. The landmark case seeks compensation for Shi Tao and other freedom of expression defenders and an end to the divulging of Internet user information by search engines when human rights violations could result.

With some 350 million cell phones in China, increased use of cell phone text messaging and other new technologies by activists, citizens and journalists has also drawn government attention. In June 2007, for example, environmental activists in the Southern coastal city of Xiamen used SMS messages to organise opposition to the construction of a new power plant in the city that, the activists claimed, would have irreparably damaged the city’s natural beauty.

Repression of Media Workers

China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. As of December 2006, the Chinese government was holding more than 30 journalists in prison, some of whom had been imprisoned for more than a decade. Many of them were jailed merely for publishing accounts of government corruption or calling for peaceful political reform. (For a complete list of journalists known to be imprisoned in China, see www.cpj.org.)

‘It was hoped that the authorities would open up the country to a greater degree of freedom of expression in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games. However, it appears that the government is instead instituting a crackdown on domestic media.’

It was hoped that the authorities would open up the country to a greater degree of freedom of expression in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games. However, it appears that the government is instead instituting a crackdown on domestic media. On 30 May 2007, Sun Lin (known by his pen name Jie Mu), a reporter for the Chinese-language newspaper Boxun News, was beaten and arrested by police on spurious charges of illegally possessing weapons and heading a criminal gang, charges which could carry a sentence of life imprisonment or death. Sun Lin had written a number of articles on issues that had angered the Chinese authorities. Directly before his arrest, he wrote a report in which he discussed Boxun’s unsuccessful efforts as an internationally based news agency to gain accreditation for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Murders and attacks on journalists are also on the rise. With demand for investigative pieces increasing, journalists are coming under a new kind of threat in the form of violent retribution from individuals or groups implicated in reports. In January 2007, Lan Chengzhang, then a new reporter for the China Trade News, was beaten to death with lead pipes by a band of thugs hired to protect a local coal mining company in Shaanxi province. In the wake of his death, a dispute emerged over whether Lan Chengzhang was in fact a ‘real’ journalist, with some sources claiming that his goal was not to report on the mining company, but rather to extort bribes from its management in exchange for his silence. The incident, far from the first such case, sparked a debate among journalists and government officials nationwide about the role of the media in China, and the ways in which government over-regulation and breaches of ethics by journalists themselves contribute to an environment that can be extremely dangerous for media workers.

Media Censorship

A major factor enhancing the quality of reporting by the Chinese news media is growing professionalism among Chinese journalists. While in the past many journalists accepted their role in propagating Communist Party policy, a growing number of journalists now see themselves as playing an important oversight role. However, despite this growing trend among some journalists, the overwhelming majority spend most of their time trying to find ways to circumvent the system rather than attempting to challenge it. Caijing editor-in-chief Hu Shuli voiced the view of many of her colleagues when she observed that, ‘I know how to measure the boundary lines. We go up to the line – and we might even push it. But we never cross it.’

‘A major factor enhancing the quality of reporting by the Chinese news media is growing professionalism among Chinese journalists. While in the past many journalists accepted their role in propagating Communist Party policy, a growing number of journalists now see themselves as playing an important oversight role.’

Sensitive or even forbidden topics include the discussion of darker moments of post-1949 Chinese history, including the failed political movements of the pre-reform era; the lives and political views of senior leaders; calls for far-reaching political reform and the advantages and disadvantages of the one-party State; certain subjects related to the domestic human rights situation; the Tiananmen Square massacre; and cases of economic corruption that involve the sons and daughters of senior leaders. In many of the most sensational corruption cases, such as the 2007 arrest and subsequent prosecution of Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu, media outlets are required to rely exclusively on the State-run New China News Agency reports, and are prohibited from reporting independently.

In one recent incident in June 2007, three senior editorial staff from the southwest daily Chengdu Wanbao were dismissed after a younger employee passed a one-line ad that referred to the mothers of victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The employee published the ad unaware of its politically forbidden status – censorship on the issue in China is so rigorous that she knew nothing of the atrocity.

Bribery has created a new mechanism for censorship in China, albeit one that is self-imposed. Despite the growing trend towards professionalism among some journalists, many others think nothing of taking money – usually euphemistically referred to by the red envelopes in which the cash is placed – or gifts from story subjects. There has been a steady undercurrent of anecdotal reports of journalists taking money as payment for keeping silent on public corruption or private malfeasance. In one prominent case from August 2005, Fan Youfeng, a journalist from the Henan Business News, published a story which described journalists lining up to take payments from government officials in order to keep quiet on a local mining disaster. Fan Youfeng was suspended and the editor who had encouraged him to pursue the story was dismissed.

Art Censorship

Significant barriers to free expression reach across the spectrum of cultural products, restricting books, films, plays and television serials. The government has exercised its authority to severely punish both publishers and individual writers who cross the line, and as a result many authors, playwrights and others prefer to censor themselves, toning down their message rather than risking potential administrative or criminal sanctions. Many authors adhere to a set of unwritten rules: novelists, for example, know that a corrupt official should not be too senior and, in the end, malfeasance should come to light. One author, Yan Lianke, a popular social satirist, even produced a dual version of a comic novel about the life of a Chinese academic. Yan Lianke, who had already lost more than one work to the censors, produced a ‘real’ version for the overseas market, and a less satirical one for consumption inside China. Such compromises are typical among China’s novelists, writers and artists.

Other Targets of Censorship

Ethnic minority issues are considered to be extremely sensitive and it can be extremely risky to write about them. Regulations forbidding ‘splittism’ or incitement of ethnic hatred are generally viewed as thinly veiled warnings not to stray too far from the government’s line on issues of ethnic relations within China. Public discussions of the plight of Tibetans or of Uighurs in China’s northwest Xinjiang autonomous region, for example, are heavily restricted, and expression of divergent views on the political and social status of ethnic minorities is generally not allowed. Some ethnic minorities complain that certain cultural expressions are forbidden.

Discussions of the political status of Taiwan, and even of the day-to-day political activities of the Taiwanese pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, are similarly controlled.