About a week ago I mentioned a South China Morning Post article, “Screws tighten on mainland journalists” that outlined a 21-point memo that had come down from the Central Propaganda Department in July, giving guidelines for China’s media coverage during the Olympics. These sorts of directives are typically disseminated across the country, to editors at…
Buried in the celebration of China’s now inevitable dominance of the Olympic Games, Xinhua News Agency today reported the death of a former national leader and Mao Zedong’s brief successor with these few words: The Chinese Communist Party’s outstanding party member, a warrior for Communism long tested in his loyalty, a revolutionary for the proletariat, who…
We released another alert about Dhondup Gonsar today. He’s the Tibetan RFA reporter who is stuck in Hong Kong waiting for a visa that RFA was told had been set aside for him and RFA’s Mandarin service reporter Jill Ku Martin. We first raised Dhondup’s case on August 7, and have stayed in touch with…
OpenNet Initiative is a go-to source for CPJ and anyone else who is interested in fact-based analysis of the Internet. Its academic approach–it’s a consortium of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at…
Even with the world enthralled in the drama of the Olympic Games, the more basic struggles in the rest of China continue to quietly unfold. Nanfang Dushi Bao (Southern Metropolis Daily) today published a long article with little apparent connection to the Olympics, a rarity these days. It is actually re-posted from Zhejiang Daily, and tells the story of a farming…
Another way of getting around Intent censorship is to use proxy servers. They are basically computers whose addresses or access are not blocked by a country’s filters. You contact one of them and relay your information, say a request to access www.cpj.org (which, by the way, is still blocked as of this morning, according to…
It’s most likely too late to get one of these if you’re already in China, but for the next time you’re going behind any country’s Internet firewall, try to pick up one of these thumb drives. If you’re among the digitally impaired, as I am, it will help you dodge the online cops. All you…
Just as American audiences have been fixated on the performances of Michael Phelps during the Olympic Games, Chinese viewers have been anticipating the heroics of hurdler Liu Xiang. So his dropping out of the 110-meter race today with an injury was the headliner at major news outlets. Photographs of his anguished coach and shocked commentaries…
Thanks to Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Sophie Beach at China Digital Times for taking the time to translate and post Southern Weekend’s interview with Zhang Yimou, the once renegade movie maker who took on the job of organizing the opening…
It’s sort of fun to catch the book and movie spin-meisters who trumpet seemingly favorable blurbs artfully extracted from otherwise bad or mixed reviews. They baldly turn criticism into praise as they try to get you to buy that movie ticket or paperback. But maybe it’s more of a problem when you see a government…