PressEthic

The latest news out of China is that...there will be embargoes on some news coming out of China. After the imprisonment of journalist Shi Tao, who had forwarded details of a government document to a website based outside the country, a number of news sources (including the NYT) reported today that the Chinese government is trying to tighten its control of online news services.

The BBC reported a while back that Yahoo had been behind the jailing of Tao, having passed information about his activities to the information-sensitive government in Beijing. Yahoo itself runs a news service operation, though its complicity with the bureaucrats in the Chinese capital smacks of economic self-interest. But what else would one expect? It is no different to Rupert Murdoch’s canning of Chris Patten’s critical look at Sino-English politics, just as HarperCollins – a Murdoch-owned company – was about to publish the work.

Far more worrying is the fact that China has recently vowed to monitor internet activity and web-postings by private citizens which might be considered detrimental to the rather nebulous concept of “social order.” Previously the Chinese were encouraged to avoid sensitive areas such as democracy (or lack thereof) and Taiwan’s independence on the internet, but now it seems that many other subjects deemed damaging to the “social order” by the government can be grounds for prosecution.

There are a number of issues here: 1. The disinclination of multinational media corporates to publish anything which may damage their business interests in China, since any business is conducted only by permission of Beijing. 2. The Chinese government’s desire to monitor its citizens’ intellectual activity via the web, in an era of 100million Chinese internet users. 3. The government’s controlling of internal media organizations and journalists.

This will not be an issue that goes away anytime soon, I would surmise. As the Chinese people gain increasing access to external media sources, especially via the world wide web – and policing 100 million users will surely prove impossible – their desire to gain further intellectual independence from a relatively repressive and reactionary government will itself grow.