{ 2007 04 24 }

Internet censorship in China snore …

A stint at Xinhua has ensured I will never be able to write about China for a foreign news agency. I edited this story last night:

 The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee said on Monday that China would promote and produce more “healthy online cultural products” as part of their efforts to promote social harmony.

Participants at the Politburo meeting, presided over by Chinese President Hu Jintao asked all publicity and cultural organizations to produce more high-quality online cultural products, which “represent the social progress and the splendid traditional culture of China”.

Such moves were aimed at “nurturing a healthy online culture” and preventing “decadent” online material from spreading over the Internet, said a news release from the meeting.

The Politburo said China would also make more efforts to promote the ideology of Marxism over the Internet, according to the news release.

China’s Internet population jumped by almost 24 percent last year to reach 137 million, around one in ten Chinese, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

President Hu Jintao said earlier this year that the rapid development of the Internet in China has played an important role in spreading information, knowledge and CPC policy, but has also raised new issues for the country’s cultural development.

“Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information and the stability of the state,” Hu said.

In other words, same old. Not worth bashing letters on a keyboard - as is demonstrated by the quality of my editing. Although, I did have to send back the first version of it to ask the writer to make sense of embarrassing phrases such as “promote the good, the pure and the beautiful”. I told her not to waste much time on it. Just another barrage of empty words, I said. Clearly not a news story, I concluded.

Of course, Reuters and AP picked it up and now it is all over the Internet. Not that I am admitting I was wrong. Reuters said it themselves in their own report (before repeating the same old).

The meeting was far from the first time China has sought to rein in the Internet. In January, Hu made a similar call to “purify” it, and there have been many such calls before.

But the announcement indicated that Hu wants ever tighter controls as he braces for a series of political hurdles and seeks to govern a generation of young Chinese for whom Mao Zedong’s socialist revolution is a hazy history lesson.

I suppose being drowned in news/government press releases every day does lead to saturation. Gradually, you lose touch with what is deemed newsworthy overseas (emphasis on deemed of course). Tales of Internet censorship just don’t do it for me anymore. What I want to know is what does the Politburo think of proxies? But I would hope that even readers of MSNBC were not spilling their coffee in reaction to the headline “China launches plan to censor Internet”.

Ah well, I’m off to try and explain to an editor why AP and Reuters picked up a story I labelled “worthless”.

By the way, Xinhua managed to write a couple of articles about Boris Yeltsin without mentioning the phrase “stood on top of a tank during the 1991 coup attempt”.

Posted by Chris O'Brien on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007, at 11:58 am, and filed under Censorship.

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