Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Commission and of the US Congress, ladies and gentlemen:
Thank you for holding this important hearing and inviting me to address the subject of censorship in China.
While preparing for this hearing, one question came to mind: if the SARS virus had not hitched a few rides beyond China’s borders to places like Canada and Singapore, would we have heard about it by now? Would the Chinese public have heard about it by now? And the truth is, the answer is most likely not. Perhaps rumors would be going around, perhaps some foreign correspondents would write some articles about it for overseas readers, but most likely even those who contracted the illness would not even know there was an epidemic going on.
Take AIDS, for example. How many years was it before Beijing admitted to an AIDS problem and how many Mainlanders actually know the extent of the threat? It was not until last year, under pressure from foreign press and the UN that the leadership in Beijing increased its HIV estimate from 30,000 cases to over 1 million. Whether or not this revised estimate is accurate remains to be seen, just as we cannot know with any great certainty the real extent of the SARS epidemic. More importantly, how many villagers in central China have been given enough information to know the risk they take in selling their blood? Have actual steps been taken to sterilize equipment to prevent further contamination?
The Chinese regime’s usual response to a health scare is to just cover it up and hope it will go away by itself. Why? Because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s primary mandate is to stay in power. To do so, it must regulate public sentiment and maintain a good image of itself, regardless of the reality, and that requires keeping a tight grip on information.
The running joke amongst Chinese intellectuals about the state-run newspaper, The People’s Daily, is that the only thing factual in it is the date. Even the foreign press and correspondents in China must operate within certain parameters to ensure they will not be detained or shut down.
Although it is unclear exactly how long the SARS virus has actually been around, one of the main reasons -- perhaps the only reason -- the Chinese government was forced to go from complete denial to finally admitting to the presence of SARS within a few months is because it is a disease that directly affected the international community and thus external pressure was brought to bear on the Chinese leadership.
This Commission wishes to learn through this hearing the "scope of media control and censorship in China." I believe that the manipulation of information is such a crucial element in the identity and survival of the CCP that I submit to you today that without media control and censorship, it is very likely the Chinese Communist Party would quickly cease to exist in its current form. I say that because once the Chinese people and the world can take a good, hard look at the skeletons in the CCP’s closet and the degree to which the Party serves its own interests to the detriment of the Chinese people, the very existence of the Party could very well be called into question.
And so, information control may be the Chinese regime’s greatest source of strength, the key to its success, but at the same time, it could also very well be its most formidable weakness.
Manipulation of information as a source of power
The CCP has always been very systematic and consistent in its manipulation of information. Usually the image that is fed to the public often has little to do with reality, as the goal is political expedience, not balanced reporting.
Since the early days, the Party has known that media can alter reality in the minds of the people. As far back as the 1920s, when the CCP was still in its infancy, it had already set up a Department of Propaganda modeled after Stalin’s system. In 1957, the CCP began his first public purge of outspoken intellectuals in an effort to control what was being thought and discussed amongst the masses. Millions were sent to jail, "re-education" camps, and mental institutions for expressing their opinions; thus began the CCP’s success story of muzzling the people. Mao also tried to destroy traditional Chinese culture and values in an effort to better allow the foreign transplant of Communist ideology to take root and grow. The anti-Confucius campaign in the early 70s, for example, was aimed at removing all Confucian influence on Chinese society through burning books and denunciation of the ancient and deeply ingrained teachings.
In the early 80s, Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reforms in a move to save the collapsing economy. As historians have pointed out in recent years, however, "economic reform" simply meant that all the Communist Party had to do was slightly loosen its hold on economic activities. When Deng realized a certain degree of freedom of expression also started showing up with the package, some dissidents were arrested and there was a clampdown on free speech. Nonetheless, the economy started to grow and free expression among the populace also continued to find its outlets throughout the 80’s.
All that was to come to an abrupt end on June 4, 1989, as solders were ordered to shoot student demonstrators on Tiananmen Square. It is a testament to the power of China’s propaganda machine that despite the bloodshed we in the US saw on TV, to this day, apart from certain Beijing residents, many Chinese people continue to believe that no students were killed in the incident and that the victims of this so-called "counter-revolutionary rebellion" were actually the soldiers. This is the extent to which the Communist Party has been able to control the thinking of the people.
China’s Propaganda Ministry is both the CCP’s news watchdog and news generator because its censorship includes not only blocking information but also disseminating misinformation and controlling what gets said or not said, as we saw with the SARS cover-up. Every province in China, every city, and every workplace has a propaganda division to ensure that the press and other information outlets are consistent with the message or policy from Beijing. Foreign investors in China are also instructed to allow the government to set up CCP branch committees in their joint venture corporations so that Chinese employees will not be contaminated by foreign "unhealthy elements."
The media has even become a deadly weapon for repression in China. Jiang Zemin, who was the Chinese president and is now its military leader, has been mindful of Mao’s remark that political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution "need to come every seven or eight years." With such periodic "class struggles," Mao believed that society would stay disciplined and united around the CCP dictatorship. Whipping up the requisite fervor to have such a struggle, however, requires both the suppression of true information and the creation and dissemination of false information. As a result, in the summer of 1999, Jiang ordered his propaganda machine to launch a smear campaign against a peaceful meditation practice called Falun Gong, blaming suicides and murders on Falun Gong practitioners.
For the past four years, the Chinese people see and read the negative propaganda. In the absence of other sources of information, how would they know that Falun Gong, like all practices of the Buddhist tradition, prohibits the taking of life and advocates non-violence and the principles of "Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance"? But the misinformation has prompted neighbors to turn in neighbors, schools to expel their students, and families to turn against their loved ones. If people are repeatedly told that police have never tortured or killed anyone who practices Falun Gong but rather treats them with humanity, how is anyone to know about the countless eyewitness accounts of torture and even murder of innocent Falun Gong practitioners in the labor camps and "re-education" classes? This atrocity, unfortunately, is still being played out, even though it violates every human rights code, including China’s own constitution.
Cyber Censorship
The latest battleground for information control is the Internet. Guo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) a couple of years ago: "Mao Zedong said that to have power you need two things: the gun and the pen ... The Communist Party has the gun, but the Internet is now the pen. If they lose control of it, something will happen to challenge their authority." Incidentally, the CPJ lists Jiang Zemin among the top ten enemies of the world press.
And so, thousands of Internet cafes in Beijing and all over China have been shut down for "security reasons." All Internet services are required to install filtering software to block prohibited sites and monitor some 45 million Chinese Internet users.
One notable case involves Miss Liu Di, a 22-year-old student who was arrested on the campus of Beijing Normal University on November 7, 2002, on the eve of the opening of the Communist Party's 16th Congress. She had posted messages signed "the stainless steel mouse" in discussion forums. Reporters Without Borders reports that the authorities accuse her of "jeopardizing national security." Her situation is perilous as China’s Supreme Court determined in January 2001 that the punishments for breaking the law on state secrets and the dissemination of information jeopardizing the state included the death penalty. Liu Di’s family has still not been allowed to see her and authorities say they are not revealing her place of detention in order to put "pressure" on her.
Just a few days ago, four more young Internet dissidents were sentenced to prison terms of up to 10 years for discussing the growing social problems and for posting reform-minded essays on the Internet. Reporters Without Borders estimates that more people are in prison in China for expressing their views on the Internet than in any other country in the world.
The arrests of this new breed of cyber dissidents are the result of a program called "Golden Shield." Researchers say this secret program was proposed by the Ministries of Public Security and Information Industry and assigned sizeable financial and human resources. It involves a cyber police force of an estimated 30,000 persons and it is capable of spotting, identifying and arresting dissident Internet users. The government has also issued more than 60 laws and sets of regulations about use of the Internet.
One incident that raised eyebrows in the international community was a decree from the CCP in early September last year that banned the Internet search engines Google.com and AltaVista.com. Unlike some other media, as search engines, Google and AltaVista are apolitical. One week after the initial ban, Google was back in China, but only partially. The UK-based Guardian noted: "…when the magic name of Chinese president Jiang Zemin was entered, Google consistently replied that the information ‘is currently unavailable’… A click on ‘BBC News’ produces a blank and even the weather in England and Scotland is banned."
Beijing denied all knowledge of this ban, as it normally does with its other forms of censorship. One Hong Kong’s human rights group reports that over 500,000 foreign websites are currently blocked in China on the grounds that Chinese people might be exposed to pornography and other "unhealthy elements" from abroad. Among such "unhealthy" websites are news sites for The Washington Post and The Sydney Morning Herald, to name a few.
US Government and Private Sector Efforts
The US government’s efforts to bring alternative sources of information to the Chinese public are consistently blocked. Although many in China try to listen to Voice of America and Radio Free Asia on short-wave radios, the frequencies for these two US-based media are jammed in China.
China guards its information monopoly jealously. An American citizen, Dr. Charles Li, is currently serving a three-year sentence in China on charges of allegedly "preparing" to break through a television signal to broadcast outside information to the people of China. He has been held in a Chinese prison for more than four months and has gone on a hunger strike since May 27 according to a US consular based in Shanghai. Dr. Li has been reportedly beaten, given forced feeding and brainwashing classes. The US government and Dr. Li’s fellow Americans should all pay attention to the case because no matter how much we hope the Chinese regime is now telling the truth about SARS or anything else, as long as Dr. Li and all the other dissidents who have tried to break through the censorship remain incarcerated, it should be painfully obvious that China’s clamp on information is every bit as strong as it ever was.
As for the private sector, rather than bringing greater freedom to China, in the scramble for profits, some Western companies are instead more likely to be bringing Chinese-style censorship to the West. While US government attempts to get information into China are consistently blocked, Chinese government propaganda is welcomed daily into American homes. Many of you may have heard about a major US media company’s deal to bring cartoons and entertainment programming to certain outlets in Southern China in exchange for putting content from China’s state-run television system, CCTV, on cable in the United States. This US company willingly signed an agreement that it would refrain from broadcasting the news or any other programming that might be considered "sensitive."
It is also common knowledge that many Chinese language newspapers, radio stations and TV stations in the US are actually backed by the Chinese Communist Party and have been spouting the Party line from SARS to other issues such as the US war against Iraq. For example, a Chinese TV network in New York recently repeated Beijing’s SARS death toll, which was suspiciously low relative to the numbers released by the World Health Organization. For many Chinese-speakers, this TV station might be the only source of information. In a sense, the whole culture of fear and repression is also exported along with TV programming. Many overseas Chinese do not dare speak to reporters or say what they think about the Chinese government for fear that agents from the Chinese Embassy and consulates are watching or tapping their phones. Oftentimes their fears are not unfounded.
In the interests of not only free speech but also U.S. national security, I would have to suggest that the US government encourage and support the existence of alternative sources of Chinese-language media within the US to provide a counterpoint. The people of China are important, and so are the Chinese Americans in our own backyard.
Other parts of the private sector in the U.S. seem also more likely to bow to censorship than advocate free speech in China. The Los Angeles Times reported last year that some 300 Western businesses and other organizations signed what was called the ‘Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for China's Internet Industry,’ otherwise known as a self-censorship agreement.
Moreover, it is no secret now that China’s sophisticated firewall was built with the assistance and know-how of overseas corporations. With technology so obviously being used to implement repression, the software industry has become somewhat more tight-lipped about its long-time claim that technology transfer can only help the cause of democracy and freedom in China.
There are, however, private companies that are attempting to break through the firewall. I have recently learned of a software company that has developed an Internet anti-censorship technology that can avoid being blocked and is able to deliver web content to users inside Mainland China. Their system has been in service for about ten months. Even with limited resources, the company states that the current number of daily users reached through their service is over 30,000 with over 7 million hits daily. Apparently with greater demand for news about the SARS and other critical matters, more and more web surfers in China have been accessing overseas websites over the last couple of months and this new technology is there to help them. Companies like this one, I must add, need the financial support from our government for research and development, as well as for bringing down the firewall of China.
Chinese government and media reaction to SARS
In the run-up to the critical 16th People’s Congress last November, China’s Propaganda Department was working overtime, sending out a hefty memo to editors informing them which topics were considered off-limits — basically anything and everything that could possibly reflect poorly on the Party’s job performance, even industrial accidents and a food poisoning incident. The Propaganda Department warned the media: "For those newspapers that frequently have problems, we'll discuss whether to let them keep running."
Under these conditions, no reporter dared touch the topic of SARS, or known in China euphemistically as "atypical pneumonia," a mild term that conveys none of the severity of the actual disease.
There are few of us here who have not heard about the media blackout during this time, about how it was not until about April 20 of this year that the Chinese leadership admitted that SARS existed as an issue. The official figures went up and the government decided to fire scapegoats Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and the mayor of Beijing Meng Xueinong for what state media said was their inadequate response to the outbreak. The leadership claimed it was now going to come clean with the WHO.
On Monday, June 2, however, AP reported that a top Chinese health official, Gao Qiang, was still trying to deny claims that Beijing tried to hide the seriousness of the SARS virus. He claimed that the government warned about SARS as early as February and that early efforts to fight it were slowed by poor information.
In addition, getting accurate numbers in China is a little easier said than done. Asia Times reported this past Monday that there appeared to have been an outbreak in SARS at a residential complex called Beiyuan Gardens. With more than 10,000 residents living in close proximity to each other, the outbreak threatened to be the next Amoy Gardens — the Hong Kong housing complex where more than 300 people contracted SARS and about 35 died. Asia Times reports: "Beijing media have yet to report on the situation at Beiyuan Gardens. Some residents have tried to bring attention to their situation via public websites, but, for example, their information was deleted within less than a minute after posting it on the popular Internet portal Sina.com. Even their telephones are now unable to send out text messages - Beiyuan Gardens residents have become overnight outcasts. Having fallen into despair, some residents of Beiyuan Gardens sent a letter to Wang Qishan, Beijing's new mayor… Complex residents are still waiting for Mayor Wang's response."
Does this sound like the reaction of a government and a media that are committed to transparency? In Hong Kong, residents of the Amoy Gardens were quickly evacuated, quarantined, and given food, shelter, and medical care. In Mainland China, it appears the residents of Beiyuan Gardens are being shut out by the security apparatus and left to their own devices, free to contract SARS and infect others.
In China, the leadership can claim to be reporting accurate numbers, but the truth is, who is to say they are not playing a cat and mouse game with the World Health Organization? Who is holding it accountable? Even in the midst of a global SARS crisis, the Chinese regime still keeps a close eye on its political interests. For example, the regime insisted on blocking the WHO from sending inspectors to Taiwan to help them control the spread of the disease. Some things never change.
Long-term Impact?
As for any long-term impact the SARS crisis will have on transparency and media control in China, it would be difficult to draw any conclusions at this time. We do not know how long and how serious the SARS epidemic will prove to be and how much of an overall impact it will have on China’s economy. We do not know how the different factions in the government will behave. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s track record and its willingness to resort to any and all means in pursuit of self-preservation, however, my sense is that making China into a more transparent and open entity could be a bit like asking a tiger to turn vegetarian. In its eyes, giving up meat could endanger its very survival, and by the same token, a totalitarian regime without media control wouldn’t be much of a dictatorship at all.
There is one thing that the SARS epidemic, in spreading to other nations, has done, and that is to focus more international attention on the issue of transparency in China. The way the Chinese regime attempted to cover up the situation and to disseminate falsehoods both domestically and internationally seriously damaged its credibility, but it is a lesson China needed to learn. It has been a wake-up call for foreign governments, too -- a reminder that this is still a repressive regime that has been a compulsive liar for more than 50 years. Maybe SARS will take away some of the blinders of the US private sector when it comes time to assess the uncommonly rosy economic figures that China puts out every year.
Certainly SARS has made the ASEAN nations reconsider their relation to China as their tourist revenues drop and their economies suffer. As one Hong Kong based reporter wrote in late April this year, "In contemporary international relations, soft power matters. Reputation, transparency and accountability are all important measures to reflect one's standing in the global hierarchy. In its mishandling of SARS, China has squandered precious political capital that it has built up over the past five years. It will be a long time before China can restore its internal and international position...."
Thus, while the SARS crisis itself may or may not make China change its long-term habits, perhaps one lesson the international community can draw from this is that external pressure works. If a behavior endangers human lives, instead of coddling China or keeping a deferential distance, China can be pressured to do better. Over time, better behavior is better for the Chinese people, for the Chinese regime itself. Ultimately, better behavior and a little humility could have far-reaching implications for the creation of a more open society that is better equipped to participate in the international community.