Mr. Chairman and Members of the Commission:

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Commission today. I appreciate your invitation to discuss Radio Free Asia’s efforts to broadcast information to China on the SARS public health threat.

I would like to begin by giving a brief overview of Radio Free Asia’s mission and broadcasts. I’ll then move on to a description of how the Chinese media covered–or failed to cover–the SARS crisis, together with details on how RFA dealt with the epidemic. I’ll follow with an analysis of the short and long-term impact of the crisis on media controls in China, closing with a short note on China’s jamming of international broadcasts.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a private, non-profit corporation broadcasting news and information in 12 languages and dialects to listeners in Asia who do not have access to full and free news media. RFA launched its first broadcast in September 1996. The purpose of RFA is to deliver accurate and timely news, information, and commentary, and to provide a forum for a variety of opinions and voices. RFA seeks to promote the rights of freedom of opinion and expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any medium regardless of frontiers, as stated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

RFA’s mission both reflects and promotes the highest ideals of the United States as well as East Asia’s long and admirable tradition of truth-telling — and of speaking truth to power. In the Analects, for example, Confucius is asked by a student how to serve a prince. Confucius doesn’t advise the young man to blindly follow the prince’s orders. Instead, he replies, "Tell him the truth. Even if it offends him." This truth-telling often runs counter to the dictates of authoritarian governments in the region, but the Chinese people deserve accurate, thorough, and balanced information. We hear this every day, in half a dozen languages and dialects, from callers all over China. To suggest otherwise underestimates the wisdom, resourcefulness, and intelligence of the Chinese people. We all know of talented Chinese journalists who work hard to report the news, but they do so under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

Via shortwave transmission and the Internet, RFA broadcasts daily to China, North Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in Mandarin, Cantonese, Uyghur, three dialects of Tibetan, Burmese, Vietnamese, Korean, Lao, and Khmer. Each language service is staffed entirely by native speakers and the programming of each service is distinctive, reflecting particular cultural and customary preferences. Most RFA programs focus on domestic news and information. RFA generally airs international news only when it directly affects one or more of the countries to which we broadcast.

All broadcasts originate from RFA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, incorporating reports from correspondents throughout Asia. RFA maintains bureaus in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Phnom Penh, Dharamsala, Bangkok, Seoul, and Ankara, along with individual reporters in many other key locations in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world.

Incorporated in the District of Columbia, RFA is a journalistically independent organization whose autonomy is key to providing objective news and information to its listeners. In preparing its programming, RFA follows the strictest journalistic standards of objectivity, fairness, quality and integrity, avoiding bias toward any people, government, or nation.

The U.S. Congress authorized the creation of RFA through the International Broadcasting Act of 1994. Funding is obtained from an annual federal grant. The bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors, appointed by the U.S. President with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate, serves as RFA’s corporate board of directors, making and supervising grants to RFA.

The SARS epidemic has dramatized the degree to which the Chinese government and Communist Party continue to control the media in China. Early on, the government simply blacked out the news of SARS. After months of silence, outside pressure from the World Health Organization and information flowing in from the outside world forced the government to admit that China faced a "serious" situation.

As the Washington Post pointed out a few days ago, it was only on April 20, more than a month after the WHO issued a global alert about SARS, that the Chinese leaders admitted that a problem existed and launched a nationwide campaign to fight the epidemic. At that point, they permitted the state-controlled media to provide more comprehensive coverage of the SARS crisis.

China’s turnaround on the issue came after a courageous retired military doctor, Jiang Yanyong, made a statement to Time magazine and then gave a number of interviews to foreign reporters in which he openly accused the government of a cover-up. He revealed that many more SARS patients were being treated in Beijing than the government and Chinese media had reported. That Dr. Jiang is no longer giving interviews to the foreign media is not a good sign: He appears to have been gagged.

On February 10, RFA’s Cantonese language service did the radio’s first report on the outbreak of a mysterious disease described as atypical pneumonia — it was later to be called SARS — in Guangdong Province. At that point, no deaths had been reported but the Guangdong Provincial press office confirmed the existence of the disease. From that day onward, the Cantonese service began daily reporting on the SARS phenomenon. Correspondents in Taiwan and Canada began sending in regular reports of the spread of the illness overseas.

The Chinese media ignored SARS at the time. But recently, Gao Qiang, the No. 2 official at China’s Health Ministry, claimed that the China media had sounded the alert through a brief article in the People’s Daily published on February 12. The People’s Daily article did report that five people had died of a pneumonia-like ailment in Guangdong. But, according to the Washington Post, the article also emphasized that the situation was "already basically stable" and that a widespread outbreak of the disease would not occur. China’s propaganda authorities then banned all reporting about the disease.

Despite Mr. Gao Qiang’s claims, the officially-guided Chinese media did little to alert the rest of the country that it might have a problem. Chinese Central Television (CCTV) declared at one point that China was not threatened by a new disease. Local officials said the atypical pneumonia was "under control." But Beijing denied access to a WHO team that sought access to Guangdong. WHO epidemiologists began within a few weeks to suspect that Guangdong was the starting point or "ground zero" for the disease and that the real number of cases in China was much higher than those 305 reported by the province.

In mid-February, RFA’s Mandarin service prepared its first major investigative report on atypical pneumonia, when the Chinese state media was still virtually silent on the issue. From November 16 to February 9, Chinese health authorities in Guangdong had reported 305 cases of the disease. Among them were 105 physicians and nurses who had treated SARS patients. And, as stated earlier, at least five people had died. But the media made little of all this.

The RFA investigative report concluded that the local government was blacking out news of a mysterious new disease and that as a result of a dearth of information, people were panicking. In preparing this report, an RFA broadcaster telephoned hospital, medical supply, and research center officials in Guangzhou as well as local residents and officials in Heyuan city. RFA conducted the first interview of which I am aware with Dr. Zeng Jun, director of the First People’s Hospital in Guangzhou. Dr. Zeng later became a credible source of information on SARS for a number of foreign journalists.

Despite the courage of some local officials and physicians who believed that the public had a right to know, people still had no clue as to how the disease was spread. They lined up outside stores to purchase rice, salt and vinegar, which were believed to prevent the pneumonia. One official in Guangdong, who declined to be named, criticized the local government for failing to release the news sooner. He told RFA that the more the government tried to hide the facts, the more panicky the public became.

In March, RFA’s Mandarin and Cantonese services began to provide exhaustive

coverage of SARS from areas that were hardest hit by the disease. Reporters in Hong Kong, Taipei, Toronto, Bangkok, and Washington all contributed to the effort. An RFA correspondent in Hong Kong who files RFA’s regular "China media watch" feature pinpointed issues and facts concerning SARS that China’s state-controlled media failed to report. The officially-controlled media still seemed reluctant to report anything of substance on the issue, and some listeners, particularly those in remote provinces, reported that they first learned about SARS in February from RFA.

One of those listeners, a first-time caller to RFA’s Voices of the People call-in show from Hohhut in Inner Mongolia claimed that the official media had grossly under-reported SARS figures in that province. He said that probable and suspected SARS patients were being quarantined together with confirmed patients. People who had the symptoms were now afraid to go to the hospital for check-ups for fear of being placed near confirmed SARS patients.

In March, RFA’s Mandarin service was the first to report that authorities in Beijing had suspended all classes at the Beijing Zhongguancun First Primary School because of fears that a student might have contracted the SARS virus. At times Beijing residents are reluctant to talk with RFA about sensitive issues, but a brave teacher at the school told a Mandarin service reporter that a fourth-grader’s grandfather had a confirmed case of SARS. "We are responsible for the students, and we must tell the whole truth," the teacher said.

Listeners telephoning RFA’s call-in shows indicated that SARS had become a much bigger issue for many people in China than the Iraq war or other major events that were grabbing world headlines. Some callers provided tips for news stories that our services would then seek to confirm.

Local officials began to talk more openly to RFA reporters about SARS, although some requested anonymity. Information from one official who was interviewed at the end of April led RFA to break the news that some hospitals were charging impoverished migrant workers the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to treat their SARS symptoms. This was occurring despite orders from the central government to waive medical fees for those who could not afford treatment. As a result, an unknown number of workers were fleeing the hospitals and returning home to rural areas where the health care system has been in decline. There was a very real danger that some of these workers might inadvertently spread the SARS virus.

The Mandarin service covered SARS from many angles in April, airing a variety of public reactions from inside China as well as expert opinion that was unavailable through the domestic media.

By early May, the Mandarin service was carrying as many as nine stories on SARS in each of its hour-long Asia-Pacific reports. Here are some examples of the physicians, officials, and health care experts interviewed for stories broadcast in April and May:

• Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the courageous physician at the People’s Liberation Army Hospital No. 301, who stepped forward to reveal that those who had died or been infected in Beijing were a dozen times more numerous than top Chinese officials admitted.

• Directors of respiratory disease departments of Zhongshan Medical School in Guangzhou and at the Guangzhou First People’s Hospital.
• A staffer with the Chinese Ministry of Health’s SARS special task force.
• Dr. James Maguire, who was traveling with the WHO inspection team in Shanghai.
• Officials in the Henan provincial government and Xiong county government.
• Doctors, nurses and other health care workers in hospitals throughout China.

RFA’s second largest service, the Tibetan service, also extensively covered the SARS epidemic. Although Tibet had been listed officially as one of the few SARS-free areas in China, Tibetans were vulnerable to the disease due to poor health care and lack of information. Authorities did not adequately inform the local people the danger of the disease, and some critical information was kept from the public. Reporters contacted people inside Tibet and learned that suspected carriers coming on buses from inland China to Lhasa had been quarantined and given medical checks. Trains arriving in Xining city were stopped outside the city limits and those suspected of being infected with SARS were taken away by medical workers. This information from Amdo area in Qinghai Province was promptly broadcast to the target area after being verified by other sources. As a result, we received calls from listeners saying that they would never have known of these things had they not listened to RFA’s Tibetan broadcast.

Tibetan interviewees said that government health workers had failed to adequately inform people of the dangers of coming into contact with infected people. Those in rural areas where there is little or no access to modern medical doctors and facilities said basic information was particularly helpful. The Tibetan service, therefore, produced many educational programs by inviting Tibetan doctors to provide basis information on SARS.

The Tibetan service maintained daily contacts with emergency centers set up by the authorities in Lhasa and other areas. Personnel from these centers, after some persuasion, were very cooperative and willing to talk. Several times, the service facilitated medical and information inquiries between listeners and these disease emergency centers. One Tibetan student called to say that she learned a lot about the SARS situation in Tibet by listening to RFA.

Callers to RFA’s Uyghur service hotline complained of a scarcity of information that left many Uyghurs unaware of the seriousness of the disease. The service provided Uyghur listeners with basic information from the World Health Organization.

The SARS crisis has raised hopes for a radical change in the Chinese media. In late April, the government fired the health minister and the mayor of Beijing and called for more accurate reporting on SARS from provincial officials. China’s new president, Hu Jintao, appeared willing to seize on the crisis to promote more openness. The state media played up his visits to areas that were hit hard by the SARS crisis. He seemed to be shaking off the influence of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who has been no friend of press freedom, far sooner than many had predicted. Meanwhile, Chinese newspapers reported some details on May 6 of a Chinese submarine disaster. In a country where such events normally go unreported, this seemed to signal further change.

What we are seeing here is not better journalism but what the Wall Street Journal recently described as "new and improved propaganda." In this case, the Wall Street Journal was referring to the more attractive packaging and increased timeliness of some of China’s state television programming, particularly when it came to coverage of the war in Iraq. But the comment might just as easily have applied to some of the recent coverage of the SARS crisis.

We have to keep in mind that ownership of the media is firmly in the hands of the Communist Party. And we must watch what leading Communist Party officials say about their own media, not just to the outside world, but to their own party cadres. Let’s look, for example, at what the leading Communist Party official in charge of overseeing the party’s propaganda efforts said in a recent issue of the party journal Qiushi (Seeking Truth) published on its web site on May 1. Li Changchun, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, said that propaganda units must raise public morale by highlighting the party’s achievements while exposing any problems that provoke public anger and complaints. The party should also tighten controls over the Internet and "prohibit any harmful information." On a more positive note, Li said that the party’s media organs must be run like commercial enterprises, become more market-oriented, and produce reports relevant to people’s lives.

This would simply continue a long-standing trend toward making the media more profitable, lively and relevant, which is fine as far as it goes. But it is hardly a call for more openness. If anything Li emphasizes tightening up when he says, "propaganda through the Internet as well as management of the Internet must be intensified…"

What’s missing is hard-hitting investigative journalism — the kind of reporting that would give the Chinese people the information they need to make up their own minds about the people who govern them. Many of the Chinese reporters who do this best have been silenced. Some of them have been jailed. Some have fled into exile. Some have gone into business. Others have succumbed to the lure of what is sometimes called "red envelope" journalism, a reference to journalists who produce favorable stories about those they interview in return for payoffs.

So far, the test of government tolerance for Chinese investigative journalism over the past few years has been the Nanfang Daily Group, a publishing company based in Guangzhou. The Nanfang Group publishes Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo), a paper that has gone far beyond the norm in exposing official corruption. But the Nanfang Group has paid a price. Last year, the provincial authorities demoted several editors and banned one reporter from ever working as a journalist again. This year the provincial propaganda department tightened its grip on the group by appointing a hard-line official as Southern Weekend’s editor. In mid-March, the propaganda department shut down another of the group’s publications, the 21^st Century World Herald. Its crime was to have run an interview with a former personal secretary to Mao Zedong who criticized Mao for creating a personality cult and who praised the late Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, who was a hero to many of the student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Over the long-term, the real test for the Chinese media will not be the handling of SARS which, after all, was affected by tremendous international pressure, but whether it can tackle any of the long list of taboo subjects that are still off limits to serious investigation. I have compiled my own list, which includes, among other things, the following subjects: China’s widespread worker and farmer protests, discrimination against minorities, coercive family planning, jailing and torture of dissident and Falun Gong members, the government’s failure to curb a burgeoning AIDS crisis, Taiwanese attitudes toward the mainland, and criticism of government leaders. RFA covers all of these issues, and this has aroused much hostility from the Chinese government.

China’s government is determined to block its citizens’ access to Radio Free Asia. Beijing commits a great deal of money and manpower to this effort. It uses its political influence to lobby aggressively throughout Asia to prevent governments from leasing transmission facilities to RFA. Since RFA’s inception in 1996, China has steadily increased its level of jamming and blocking every year. As one caller from Shandong Province reported, "The jamming has been really bad recently–it’s almost impossible to understand. It’s a lot worse than before." This has forced RFA and the International Broadcasting Bureau, which provides engineering support to RFA, to spend more to fight the blocking.

During RFA’s extensive coverage of the SARS epidemic in China early this spring, RFA’s listeners throughout China called and wrote to report that jamming had become even more severe than before. In April, Internet traffic to www.rfa.org directly from China more than doubled, reaching its highest levels ever as people, desperate for information, found a way to reach RFA. On May 4, China closed these remaining Internet loopholes, and traffic to RFA from China crashed to its lowest levels in 2003 and has remained there for the past 30 days. Now our listeners look for the next breakthrough or lapse in the Chinese blocking to once again gain wide access to RFA content. Today, the IBB provides valuable support to RFA by establishing proxy servers and special e-mail newsletter’s support. The most dedicated and computer-savvy RFA Internet listeners continue to reach us through these means. RFA also sends daily e-mail newsletters to hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses in China.

RFA is convinced that an open Internet would permit vital information to reach millions of Chinese people each week. Unjammed shortwave signals in China could, in my opinion, attract many millions more and would significantly cut the costs of broadcasting. But until we can break through the barriers and make ourselves known and available to the average Internet user, RFA won’t achieve its full potential. As my colleague from VOA has said, we must find solutions to end the jamming of broadcasts and the blocking of web pages.

I’d like to close by quoting one of our Chinese listeners, a retiree from central Anhui Province, who phoned our "Listener Hotline" in May to complain about jamming but also to thank RFA for broadcasting. He wanted to let us know that he remains determined to circumvent whatever obstacles the Chinese government might deploy. "Some of us think that the interference is quite serious," he said. "In fact, all the comrades who listen to Radio Free Asia… find to their surprise that you can actually hear a radio station that speaks the truth, and you should feel happy and fortunate. This is a rare opportunity. From my experience, the interference is indeed not continuous. It continues for a while and then it will be over and you can hear the program again…I think that all the audience should cherish this rare window that allows us to breath in the air of freedom."