CHINA

The main feature of 2000 was the most violent "ideological correction" campaign since the repression of the Beijing Spring in 1989. The Chinese security services followed to the letter the orders of President Jiang Zemin, who in March condemned "threats to the unity and identity of China". To make the security services' task easier, the president even named the guilty parties: "bourgeois liberals" and "supporters of the West". The authorities then drew up a list of about 100 names - the "rotten seeds", as the communist propaganda organisers called them. Many journalists are on the list, accused of failiing to respect the party's instructions, which are published in all newspapers, according to which the press must "support the cause of Marxism-Leninism, the thoughts of Mao and the theories of Deng Xiaoping". Censorship was stepped up to enable the party to keep greater control of publications with "ideologically decadent opinions". The crackdown was extended to web sites offering news online, which are growing at a spectacular pace. In June, the Internet Information Center, taking up the words of Jiang Zemin, warned webmasters against "distorted content".By the end of the year, figures published by the authorities showed that the campaign had made a severe impact: about 20 newspapers sanctioned, three publishing companies closed down, about 30 intellectuals banned from publishing anywhere in the country, five editors removed from their posts and about ten journalists dismissed. The true figures are probably far higher. According to other sources, about ten journalists were arrested during the same period, but there is no way of checking those reports.

China is also one of the countries keeping the most journalists in prison: a total of 12. Most have been given long sentences for "counter-revolutionary propaganda" or "subversive activities". Four of them have been jailed since the Beijing Spring of 1989. In May last year, the justice ministry acknowledged that 1,900 persons were imprisoned for "endangering state security". More than 600 of them have been held since October 1997. The authorities very seldom release any news of jailed journalists, and their families are threatened if they talk to the media or to human rights organisations.

China has about 2,000 dailies and more than 8,000 magazines. Only three dailies in the south of the country sell more than a million copies: Xinmin Wanbao, Yangcheng Wanbao and Nanfang Zhoumo. The People's Daily, the official newspaper, has a circulation of four million - but most of them go to government offices. Last year the press continued to expand and competition forced some newspapers, particularly in the south, to merge and modernise. Thus about 15 major press groups recently emerged in Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu. They have what is known as a "red hat", meaning that they work under the supervision of someone connected with the government. But sometimes publications take liberties with the censors. For instance a November issue of the newspaper Nanfang Zhoumo, published in the south, included an article written by a professor of law calling for the abolition of "re-education through work" penalties.

Television is subject to similar control. China has more than 360 channels that cover 90% of the country. Some media manage to escape the worst restrictions, such as the pay-channel Hunan Satellite TV which emphasises entertainment and news programmes that bear little relation to the propaganda churned out by the main national channels. In September, the government launched a satellite channel in English, CCTV-9, with the aim of "giving the whole world the opportunity to understand the new era of Chinese government and society". Its first broadcast covered the ceremonies to commemorate the 51st anniversary of the People's Republic.

Some top communist party officials saw China's membership of the World Trade Organisation as a threat to government control of communications and the media. At several meetings of party leaders, Jiang Zemin stressed the danger of the "anti-socialist" and "decadent" ideas that might affect the country when the media sector opened up. In order to "counter this invasion", he recommended that the party should step up control of the media. But with the number of news sources constantly increasing, the Beijing authorities are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain total control of the flow of information, despite intensive efforts. On a more general level, the government has rejected requests from western countries to introduce political liberalisation along with more open economic policies. So while welcoming the US Senate's vote to normalise trading relations between China and the United States, the Beijing authorities condemned clauses in the proposal concerning human rights. On 28 September foreign ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said: "The Chinese people are satisfied with the current human rights situation." He was commenting on the international organisation Human Rights in China being thrown out of a meeting between Europe, China and the human rights campaigners.

Last year the shadow of censorship and self-censorship imposed by the government was gradually extended to the Hong Kong press. Willy Lam, a star reporter with the South China Morning Post, was stripped of his responsibility for the Chinese department as a result of political pressure. It was clearly a warning. The English-language daily has lost much of its credibility and the invisible hand of Beijing has become more of a threat.

In Tibet, the "Hit hard!" campaign was stepped up as the official media reported party speeches in the name of the struggle against "separatism" and "superstitions". A subeditor who belongs to the communist party systematically checks all articles published in the region. Dorjee Tsering, a former journalist with the official press, said that 99% of the Tibetan-language reports published in the press and broadcast on radio and televisions were merely translations of news put out by the official agency Xinhua. Meanwhile, throughout last year the dissident radio station Voice of Tibet, which is based in northern India, condemned attempts to jam its wavelength. Repression is just as severe in the Xinjiang region, where the official press prints virulent attacks on Uighur separatist movements.

Repression of the Falun Gong sect, which has resulted in dozens of deaths and thousands of followers imprisoned, has also had repercussions for press freedom. Media, web sites, radio stations and underground magazines started by the rebel sect have been systematically hunted down by the security services. Foreign journalists covering the spectacular arrests of sect members and the clandestine press conferences given by Falun Gong have been harassed by the authorities.

Journalists jailed

On 1 January 2001, at least 12 journalists were imprisoned: Yu Dongyue, art critic with the Liuyang News, arrested on 23 May 1989 and sentenced to 20 years in jail; Hu Liping, a journalist with the Beijing Daily, arrested on 7 April 1990 and sentenced to ten years; Chen Yanbin, joint editor of the underground magazine Tielu, arrested at the end of 1990 and sentenced to 15 years; Zhang Yafei, joint editor of Tielu, arrested in September 1990 and sentenced to 12 years; Liu Jingsheng, a journalist with the underground magazine Tansuo, arrested on 28 May 1992 and sentenced to 15 years; Ma Tao, a journalist with the magazine News from Education to Health in China, arrested in October 1992 and sentenced to six years; Wu Shishen, a journalist with the Xinhua news agency, arrested in October 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment; Tenpa Kelsang, editor of the magazine Tibetan Literature and Language, arrested in August 1993; Gao Qinrong, a journalist with Xinhua, arrested on 4 December 1998 and sentenced to 13 years; Wang Yiliang, founder of the Chinese Cultural Revival Newsletter, arrested on 31 January 2000 and sentenced to two years of "re-education through work"; Qi Yanchen, editor of the online magazine Consultations, arrested on 2 September 1999 and sentenced to four years in jail; and Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan freelance film director, arrested in August 1995 and sentenced to 18 years.

Journalists Hu Liping and Ma Tao were due for release in 2000 after serving their sentences, but the authorities have not confirmed that they have left jail.

It was learned only last year that Gao Qinrong, a journalist with the official news agency Xinhua, had been arrested by police in the Yuncheng region of Shanxi province, south-west of Beijing, on 4 December 1998. On 28 April 1999, Gao Qinrong was sentenced to 13 years in jail, after a trial held behind closed doors, for "corruption", "embezzlement" and "procuring". Regional communist party officials accused him of investigating the failure of an irrigation project and publishing a report on his findings in Yuncheng Ribao. The local authorities claimed that the project was "a triumph over nature in this arid region", involving the construction of 67,000 reservoirs in six months. Gao Qinrong discovered that the reservoirs had never been hooked up to a water collection system and had no outlets to take water to the fields. In an article published in May 1998 in Neibu Cankao Xiaoxi, a newspaper reserved for communist party executives, Gao Qinrong said the only point of the project had been to "enhance the prestige of certain local leaders while ignoring the needs of farmers". After being sentenced, Gao Qinrong wrote to the Chinese Communist Party saying: "The party central committee has declared war on corruption. As a journalist and a member of the party, I thought it my duty to report the sufferings of the people." He was taken to Qixian prison, in Shanxi province. In September 2000 the magazine of the Chinese Association of Legal Studies, Democracy and Law, an influential official publication, examined the allegations that had resulted in the sentences and questioned the neutrality of two high-ranking Yuncheng officials, Huang Youquan and Li Zhenjiu.

The year 2000 also brought news of Tibetan musicologist and freelance film director Ngawang Choephel, who was arrested in August 1995 in the autonomous region of Tibet. Arrested as he was making a documentary on traditional Tibetan music and dance, he was sentenced on 13 November 1996 to 18 years in jail for "spying" and "counter-revolutionary activities". The authorities accused him of "distributing foreign aid and banned documents, spying for the government in exile and fomenting separatism". Taken first to Powo Tramo top-security prison Tibet, he was moved to Chengdu in Sichuan province, south-west China, in August 2000. His mother, who was allowed to visit him in September for the first time since his arrest, said he was "very thin - all skin and bones". Ngawang Choephel has been severely weakened by illness (liver and lung infections) caused by very harsh prison conditions. He is believed to have been tortured by police officers trying to make him confess to spying.It was also learned in 2000 that Li Jian, editor of the Xinjiang Trade Journal, published in the north-west of the country, had been arrested by police in November 1999 after publishing a reader's letter condemning the local authority's involvement in a corruption scandal. The courts have released no information about the case.

Xiong Jinren, and Chen Wei, writers who produce the underground magazine Chinese Cultural Revival Newsletter, were arrested in the city of Guiyang, Guizhou province, on 11 January. Wang Yiliang, a dissident journalist and writer, and Hu Jun, an academic, both of whom contribute to the newsletter, were arrested a few days later by Shanghai police. The newsletter is distributed without official permission both in China and abroad. Xiong Jinren had already been arrested in 1998 and sentenced to seven years in jail for "subversion", after the authorities accused him of planning to publish the newsletter. On 28 April 1999 Wang Yiliang was sentenced to two years' "re-education through work" by the Shanghai Re-education Committee. He was officially charged with "copying and projecting pornographic material". The court said that Wang Yiliang had shown friends the "subversive" films Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Piano Lesson, both of which had been shown in the country's cinemas. He is being held at the Shanghai camp. The three other dissidents were later released.

On 1 March it was learned that Lin Hai, the first "web dissident" to be arrested and convicted, had been freed. He had been given a two-year sentence in January 1999. His release, before he had completed his sentence, took place amid the greatest secrecy. The authorities asked him not to make contact with the foreign press. Lin Hai resumed his work as a computer technician in Shanghai.

Feng Daxun, a former journalist and militant in the banned Chinese Democratic Party, was charged with "subversive acts" on 13 June. Arrested on 16 December 1999, the dissident was accused by the authorities of carrying out interviews with workers demonstrating against late payment of their wages and sackings in the town of Neijiang, Sichuan province, in central China. Feng Daxun had already served a five-year sentence for dissident activities. He was believed to be still in jail on 1 January 2001.

Bei Ling, a poet and editor of the literary magazine Tendency, was arrested when he arrived in Beijing on 11 August for a meeting with other writers about the next issue. The police also confiscated 2,000 copies of the magazine because several articles had not been officially approved by the censorship office. On 14 August the police issued a statement saying that Bei Ling had been moved to a prison complex on the outskirts of Beijing, but did not say why. He was also fined 200,000 yuan (23,000 euros) for "illegal publishing". Bei Ling was freed on 26 August as a result of international pressure, and expelled to the United States. At the airport, where he was taken under police escort, he said: "If I don't leave China, I will stay in prison." His brother, who lives in Beijing, was also arrested and held for a week. The authorities accused him of telling the international media what had happened to his brother.

Journalists arrested

Teresa Bergada, a journalist with the Spanish-language Radio Catalunya, was arrested and beaten by police on 23 June after she had taken pictures of Falun Gong followers being arrested on Tiananmen Square. She had arrived in China a few days ahead of an official visit by Spanish prime minister José Maria Aznar. She was freed two hours after being arrested when the Spanish embassy intervened on her behalf.

Eight journalists and photographers from Sing Tao Daily, Apple Daily, Ming Pao Daily News and Oriental Daily News, all published in Hong Kong, were arrested on 14 November by Chinese plain-clothes police and held for more than three hours. No Hong Kong media were invited to the celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of Shenzhen's status as a special economic region, during which President Jiang Zemin unveiled a huge statue of Deng Xiaoping. The authorities claimed that the area where the ceremony took place was too small to accommodate the press from the former British colony. The eight journalists tried to cover the event without accreditation, but the police intervened near Mount Lotus Park, where the officials were meeting. The journalists were forced to remove the films from their cameras, and their press and identity cards were confiscated. When the ceremony was over, their documents were returned to them and they were allowed to leave.

On 12 August Ma Xiaoming, a journalist working for a television channel in Shanxi province, was arrested by police as he was waiting to meet an American journalist from the Asian Wall Street Journal. Ma Xiaoming was investigating a villagers' tax protest in the province.

Journalists attacked

Two journalists from News of the City of Nanfang were beaten by people from a village near the southern city of Guangzhou in September 2000. The villagers were protesting against the local authorities.

Ye Jianqian and Hou Wanxu, reporters from the Yangcheng Evening News, were attacked by security guards on 7 November as they were covering a fire at a shoe factory in Baiyun district, in the north of the city of Guangzhou. Their cameras were confiscated.

In early December, two journalists from the Hua Shang News were set upon by strangers in Shanxi province as they were investigating the deaths of about 40 workers in a coal mine explosion. On 9 December the director of the privately owned mine was arrested by the police, who accused him of doing everything possible to cover up the accident.

Pressure and obstruction

Foreign journalists are obliged to ask for official permission if they want to work outside Beijing. If the request is accepted, they are accompanied by an official who keeps a close watch on their work and tries to prevent them talking to people who might give "disturbing" accounts of life in China. Correspondents are often arrested by the police when they try to meet dissidents or to film demonstrations and arrests. The police question them and make them sign "confessions" in which they acknowledge that they have broken the law.

On 1 January 2000 the Beijing office of Associated Press Television News (APTN) refused to renew the contract of Béatrice Turpin, a journalist and camerawoman, because of pressure from the Chinese authorities. She had been a victim of various forms of harassment since July 1999, particularly because of her coverage of the arrests of followers of the Falun Gong movement. In October 1999 she had attended a clandestine press conference of the sect, provoking the anger of state security officials against foreign journalists. At least five were questioned and threatened with reprisals.

In early January the government office for the press and publications announced that it had sanctioned 27 newspapers that had contravened the press laws by publishing "sensational fabrications" and inaccurate reports. No details of the sanctions were mentioned.

Jiang Yiping, editor of Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) for four years, was dismissed on 10 January. The government had criticised the newspaper's handling of news on various occasions. The weekly, based in the southern city of Guangdong, had published the results of investigations into corruption among politicians and reported the social inequality caused by the government's economic policies. In December 1999 Jiang Yiping had said in an article on Chinese journalists' working conditions: "Those who mistreat or assault journalists or have them locked up are all serious people with respectable jobs. They are merely abusing their privileges."

On 12 and 23 January the Chinese authorities jammed broadcasts by the Oslo-based Voice of Tibet. Since 1996 the station has been beaming programmes to China and Tibet on shortwave, in Mandarin and Tibetan.

The government announced in the press on 26 January that new regulations regarding the "protection of state secrets" on the Internet had been adopted. Any news put on the Internet must first be checked by the relevant government department, which must also give permission for the launch of new Chinese web sites. Offenders face severe prison sentences.

Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman and independence campaigner, was sentenced in March to eight years in jail for "passing state secrets to foreign institutions" by a court in Urumqi, capital of north-western Xinjiang autonomous region. She was the main contact of her husband, a journalist at the US-based Radio Free Asia. Held since August 1999 and weakened by harsh prison conditions, Rebiya Kadeer is accused by the Chinese authorities of trying to send Chinese newspaper reports of the separatist movement to members of the US Congress. Her appeal was rejected in December.

A journalist and the editor of a publication linked to the daily Nanfang Dushibao were sacked in March after a wave of protests from the Chinese Moslem community. The newspaper had published a photograph of a pig that had been cloned in the United Kingdom alongside pictures of holy sites.

During the week of 20 March, officials of the Science and Technology Commission ordered the closure for two weeks of the Beijing weekly Haowangjiao. The supervising body claimed that the weekly had published details of Chinese military strategy in the event of a conflict with Taiwan.

The official campaign against liberal journalists and intellectuals was stepped up at the start of April. Liu Junning, an academic known for his reformist views, was dismissed from his post at the Institute of Political Science. The authorities accused him of meeting foreign journalists without official permission. A few weeks later, the government announced the publication of a book bringing together articles by "bourgeois liberals" regarded as dangerous. At the same time, the editor of the magazine Zhongguo Gaige Bao was sacked for mentioning the privatisations going on in China.

Wang Fengchao, a Chinese government representative in Hong Kong, told a gathering of journalists on 12 April that they must not publish the views of people who supported independence for Taiwan. He said the media were responsible for "defending the sovereignty and integrity of the country" and therefore self-censorship was not an infringement of press freedom. The threats came a week after the Hong Kong channel Cable TV broadcast an interview with Taiwanese vice-president Annette Lu Hsiu-lien, who is regarded by the Chinese press as "the scum of the nation". Wang Fengchao's statements caused an outcry from journalists' organisations and the democratic opposition. Two days later, another Chinese official repeated the warning to the Hong Kong media from Beijing.

On 14 April the Chinese authorities decided to close down the English-language weekly Beijing Scene, which is aimed at the foreign community in the capital. Agence France-Presse said the sanction came after Beijing Scene published an article on its web site which was considered "biased" by the authorities. In the days that followed the decision, access to the site from abroad was blocked. The weekly, which has a print-run of 20,000 and is available free of charge in Beijing, specialises in news of cultural events.

Reporter Cynthia Wan of the South China Morning Post was questioned by police on 17 April during the trial of an official accused of corruption, then banned from entering the courtroom on the pretext that her Hong Kong identity card was in English. The authorities were apparently upset by what she had already written about the case.

Also in April, the police seized dozens of satellite aerials in Shanghai. Tens of thousands of illegal aerials enable the Chinese to pick up international television channels without asking for official permission.

The South China Morning Post reported in early May that the Chinese authorities had decided to stop granting individual tourist visas to foreign journalists, who would have to obtain professional visas. Mak Yin-ting of the Hong Kong Journalists' Association said: "These measures are totally unreasonable. It is a violation of the right to freedom of movement." In practice, the Chinese continued to give journalists individual visas unless they believed they were going to China to investigate sensitive subjects.

It was learned on 13 May that a court in the southern city of Hunan had rejected an appeal filed by Zhang Shanguang, a dissident arrested in July 1998 and sentenced to ten years in jail for giving interviews to the American station Radio Free Asia.

Government officials told the management of the newspaper Shenzhen Legal Daily on 21 June that journalist He Qinglian must leave her post as a head of department. On returning from the United States, where she had been teaching at a university, she was told that she had been transferred to a "research unit", that her salary had been frozen and that she no longer had the right to publish articles in the daily. The editor said the sanction had been implemented at the request of "the highest authorities". Moreover, her articles have been banned from publication all over China since one appeared in the March edition of Shuwu Magazine, condemning social inequalities and criticising corruption among the communist party elite. The journalist is also the author of a book entitled "The Chinese Trap", which has sold more than 100,000 copies and has been described as a "masterpiece" by Liu Ji, an influential adviser to President Jiang Zemin.

The Falun Gong movement launched a radio station called World Falun Dafa on 1 July. The editorial staff are based in the United States and transmitter is in a country adjoining China. From the start, the Chinese have been jamming the station's one-hour daily broadcasts.

A few days before the birthday of the Dalai Lama on 6 July, the Chinese Propaganda Department reminded journalists that publishing or selling pictures of him was forbidden. Since 1996, the publication, distribution and possession of pictures of Tibet's religious leader, who lives in exile in India, have been punishable by prison sentences. At the same time the official media reported that the Chinese policy of combating "separatism" had been a success:

inhabitants in Guangzi autonomous region, for instance, had stopped listening to foreign radio broadcasts in Tibetan.

A representative of public television in Zhuhai, southern China, said on 11 August that the editor and two journalists had been dismissed for inadvertently broadcasting film of repression during the Beijing Spring of 1989.On 14 September the international press was prevented from covering the biggest smuggling and corruption trial ever organised in China. The spokesman for the Xiamen, Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Putian and Zhangzhou courts in Fujian province, refused to give any information about the trial, at which more than 200 communist party officials faced charges. The official press maintained a strict silence about what the international press described as the "trial of the century".

A representative of the official of the government office for radio, film and television said on 28 September that there was no question of the government opening up the cable television sector to foreign investors.

On 1 October the government published a new set of regulations on use of the Internet. Foreign companies now require prior permission from the information ministry to invest in the sector - in contravention of the undertakings made by China with a view to joining the World Trade Organisation. Webmasters of Chinese sites were told to revise or censor their news sections or face fines or closure, and to report any infringements of the regulations to the relevant authorities. They must also be in a position to supply the government with all the news put on their sites, along with the email addresses of people who had visited the sites during the previous 60 days. The new regulations recalled that it was forbidden to put on the Internet any "subversive information" that might spread "rumours liable to cause social disorder or damage social stability" or encourage Tibetan or Taiwanese separatism, or documents that contain "obscenity, pornography, violence or terrorism". These vague notions have in the past made it possible to jail dissidents and journalists.

The Macao appeal court ordered the newspaper Macau Hoje on 11 October to suspend publication for five days. The judges ruled that the paper, the biggest Portuguese-language daily in the territory, had ignored an earlier court decision that it should allow Jorge Neto Valente, a well-known lawyer, to reply to allegations made against him. The lawyer had filed a libel complaint against the daily.

On 28 October President Jiang Zemin lectured and threatened Hong Kong journalists during a press conference held in Beijing after one of them asked him if his support for the head of the former British colony was an "imperial command". The president lashed out at the journalists for asking "simplistic and naive questions". Hong Kong newspapers reacted strongly to the incident. The Hong Kong Economic Journal, for instance, said: "Such condescending ways show that Chinese leaders are arrogant and have hearts of stone."

Also in October, Lu Yuegang, a journalist with the China Youth Daily, appeared before the Shanxi court for an appeal hearing in a libel case. He was accused of libelling the village of Fenghuo and the local communist party secretary. The journalist had written a report and a book on the disfigurement of a young woman by local men. He was given a short suspended prison sentence.

The management of the South China Morning Post announced on 3 November that Willy Wo-Lap Lam was to be replaced as head of the daily's Chinese department. The newspaper said this "organisational change" in the most sensitive department was "perfectly normal and not the result of pressure". Willy Lam himself took a different view, describing the decision as "unreasonable and worrying". He said his transfer was due to criticism made of him by one of the newspaper's main shareholders, Robert Kuok, a business magnate of Malaysian origin who is close to the Chinese government, over a report on Beijing's pressing demands to Hong Kong businessmen to support the Hong Kong leader. The journalist decided to resign from the daily, condemning censorship and pressure on the staff. In an article headed "Why I left the South China Morning Post", published in an American newspaper on 10 November, he said: "Beijing's obsession with the Hong Kong press is reaching alarming proportions". He said the editor, Robert Keatley, had repeatedly asked him to "diversify" his coverage of the People's Republic because it was "too political", and to re-read his commentaries before they went to press. Willy Lam denied the allegations. A petition criticising the management's decision was signed by most members of the daily's editorial staff.

A follower of the Falun Gong sect, a Chinese woman living in the United States, was sentenced to three years in prison for "spying" by a Beijing court on 23 November. The authorities accused her of giving foreign journalists reports and pictures of followers of the sect who are being kept in psychiatric hospitals.At the end of November three journalists, including Yang Xiaofeng, editor of Lanzhou Ribao (Lanzhou Daily News) and Lanzhou Wanbao (Lanzhou Evening News), were sanctioned by officials of the communist party in Gansu, north-west China. The authorities accused Yang Xiaofeng of sending two journalists to investigate the explosion of a military truck in September in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang autonomous region (more than 1,000 miles west of Lanzhou). The blast killed more than 70 people and injured 300. The Uighur separatist movement is rampant in the region. The two journalists inquired about the circumstances of the explosion and revealed that the truck, filled with explosives, had been driven around a built-up area in contravention of legislation. The story was taken up by various newspapers all over the country. The official news agency Xinhua, on the other hand, maintained a discreet silence about the circumstances of the explosion.

At a ceremony in Macao on 20 December, President Jiang Zemin again criticised Hong Kong journalists for failing to pay attention to their "social responsibilities". He said the Hong Kong press should take as its model the Macao press which was much more "concerned about national interests".

The Chinese parliament adopted new regulations about use of the Internet on 29 December. They included a list of "criminal" activities such as "spreading rumours, libel, passing on harmful information, incitement to overthrow the government and the socialist system, or to divide the country". People found guilty face severe prison sentences.