Censored

Bob Dietz called attention to the Chinese propaganda department’s recent 21-point press directive, first reported by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The whole thing in English and Chinese is posted today at Berkeley’s China Digital Times. Among the orders given to the domestic media during the Olympic Games is that they are not to report on…

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…

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…

First, a pointer to Rebecca Mackinnon’s Asia Wall Street Journal oped from yesterday, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don’t See . She makes many of the same points I did about how the Great Firewall is leaky, and the control of the Internet in China relies on much more than technology.

During the war in Vietnam, the daily press briefings by the American military were called the “Five o’clock Follies” by the foreign press corps that was on the receiving end of the military’s damage control aimed at controlling the story from Vietnam. The Beijing Games have their own daily press meeting, at 10 am, hosted…

Kristin Jones has been doing a great job monitoring the Chinese media and the more unofficial online world. One of the realities she has pointed out is the similarity of coverage across China’s media when sensitive issues crop up. There is a reason for that. An interesting piece, “Screws tighten on mainland journalists,” ran in…