2009

New York, July 13, 2009–Chinese police should halt the detentions of journalists reporting on ethnic violence in Xinjiang and reveal the whereabouts of a Uighur academic and Internet commentator who is missing and reportedly detained in Beijing, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Chinese authorities have, unusually, welcomed foreign reporters to Xinjiang since ethnic rioting broke out on Sunday in Urumqi between the Uighur minority and Han Chinese. A Beijing-based agency has even offered to facilitate travel, according to one writer who blogs from Shanghai. (CPJ hasn’t confirmed his story. Have any other reporters been approached in this…

Security forces were protecting, rather than harassing, international journalists covering riots in northwestern Xinjiang this week–a welcome change. A few have reported official interference since Sunday. But during previous outbursts of ethnic unrest in China’s Tibetan and Uighur autonomous regions, security forces have repeatedly antagonized and expelled the foreign press corps. Foreign reporters this week…

China’s Internet censors have blinked. In the face of opposition ranging from PC makers abroad to bloggers at home, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has backed away, at least for now, from a hastily conceived directive that all new PCs sold from July 1 should carry filtering software. 

A self-styled army of Internet users, Anonymous Netizens, has announced its intention to wage war on government censors, starting July 1. Global Voices Online has the text in English; it’s also here in Chinese. Whether their scheduled attack (its nature is not specified) will be felt or not, the irritation of the document’s drafters is…

The English-language version of the state newspaper Global Times raised eyebrows on Tuesday with an article headlined, “Evolution of Chinese intellectuals’ thought over two decades.” The opinion piece included a quote from an academic referencing the “June 4 incident”–a departure for domestic, state-run media, which never refer explicitly to the peaceful demonstrations that were crushed…

The Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China (FCCC) has posted a statement on its Web site about Chinese security officials–uniformed and otherwise–harassing foreign journalists in and around Tiananmen Square. The group’s incident list includes five cases of obstruction reported in the past week. As usual in situations the government finds sensitive, police are not following regulations…