As The World Criticizes Google For Accepting Self-Censorship in China and Officials There Banning Yet Another Newspaper, It’s Worth Remembering That China Produces One In Every Seven Newspapers Hitting the Streets Globally

Philip Stone January 26, 2006

There were big damming headlines around the world that Google had sold-out to self-censorship in order to operate in China. On The Same Day Chinese authorities also closed Bing Dian, an influential weekly newspaper -- China banned 79 newspapers in 2005. And yet for all that, for five years running China still leads the world by far in the volume of newspapers coming off the presses, accounting for one in seven globally.
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Satisfied Chinese newspaper readers!

According to the 2005 Report on Development of China Newspaper Industry, written by China’s General Administration of Press and Publication, China has led the world in newspaper production volume for the past five years. And they are doing that with a rate of readership well under world averages with just 7.58% of the Chinese population buying daily newspapers, so there’s plenty of room for expansion.

China prints 90 newspapers in 13 languages, covering its various minorities.  There are also 13 foreign-language newspapers, primarily in English and Russian.

What bothers the West, of course, is exactly what news the Chinese are allowed to read in their newspapers. It’s a given that they are not going to see critical stories about the national Chinese leadership, but recently the press was seen to have become more liberalized and risked writing stories about local issues such as land graft and the like which before had not seen the light of day. But now the tide seems to be turning the other way

That is somewhat at odds with a discussion held just last November at the News Xchange television meeting in Amsterdam in which senior Chinese, American and British journalists based in Beijing seemed to agree that things were opening up somewhat.

There was general agreement that with China gearing up for the 2008 Olympic Games it realized that the entire country will be considered fair game for the hordes of journalists who will descend and it was trying not to be so heavy-handed.

Huang Hung, ceo of China Interactive Media Group, gave as an example that Time Out Magazine had wanted to have a section covering the Gay community. The censors at first said no but when they saw that Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, had run a long commentary about Gays, the censors saw that as the green light to allow the Gay section, and they approved.

There was agreement between the BBC and CNN Beijing Bureau chiefs that the problem was not at the national level, but rather with local officials afraid of being seen as too weak by their national bosses.

The young are in the forefront of tearing down restrictions. The 18-22 year-olds are way out in front of others in using the Internet and spreading the word. Not that the government doesn’t have very sophisticated tools to stop things getting out of hand, and the problem, according to Vincent Brossel, head of the Asia desk of Reporters Sans Frontiers, is that It is large American companies like Cisco that have sold the Chinese that technical capability at large profits.

Jaime Florcruz, CNN Beijing bureau chief, called it “the great firewall of China.” For instance if the word “democracy” gets written in Chinese on a web page, that page will most likely just disappear.

Brossel was steaming at the time because Yahoo had signed a self-censorship agreement as “a matter of commerce,” and he certainly won’t be pleased that Google has now gone and done the same.

Both CNN and BBC showed examples of stories they had done, going into the countryside without permission, reporting on events that would, at the least, be embarrassing to the authorities. And yet there were no repercussions.

That was November.But now in January two journalists were jailed for 10 years for magazine articles exposing local land disputes.   Did the authorities in Lishui go after those who allegedly committed land fraud? No, instead they went after the magazine and its writers.

They said the magazine was illegal because it was only registered in Hong Kong and not on the mainland, and therefore it was not allowed to raise funds on the mainland and its publication there was illegal. The authorities were particularly sensitive to the stories about the alleged land fraud after a clash between farmers and police.

As the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong explained, “‘When local villagers saw (the magazine articles) they volunteered to give the magazine 30,000 yuan. This constituted bribe taking so they were charged with fraud,’ a court official said.

“These journalists also threatened the local government. They said if the government did not resolve the peasant’s legitimate demands, they would write up the stories. This constituted extortion.”’

But Chinese journalists still show great courage even with such pressures. When the editor of the Beijing News was dismissed in December because the propaganda department didn’t like the way sensitive stories were written about the killing of seven rural protesters by officials in Dingzhou or a story about a migrant worker allegedly killing a foreman and three others because he had not received his wages, about 100 reporters walked out.

In the latest incident, Bing Dian (Freezing Point), a weekly supplement to the China Youth Daily carried an in-depth critical article about the country’s history textbooks used for pre-university. A university professor made the case that certain events such as the Boxer Rebellion and the burning of the Summer Palace by the British and French were somewhat distorted to make the foreign powers look worse than they really were, and there was no criticism of the Qing Dynasty of the time. Such criticism had been thought to be fair game; apparently no more and the weekly was closed down.

Separately, Liu Yunshan, head of the publicity department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, proudly announced last week that China had banned 79 illegal newspapers last year. He told a national work conference, “Various localities and departments should severely crack down on illegal publications, purify the cultural market, effectively curb various kinds of piracy and strengthen intellectual property right protection.”

He said that China had also closed down 17 illegal CD production lines and seized 169 million illegal publications.

As for Google and its self-censorship, company officials take the line it is better to have a Google with some self-censorship than no Google at all.

No doubt Google was also guided by customer experience rankings in China that showed it was the country’s number one ranked search engine. According to Keynote Systems Google outranked, in order, Baidu, Alibaba /Yahoo  (Yahoo Search China) and Sohu/Sogoou.

Of 13 factors measured, Google came first in 11. That is somewhat at odds with a report issued last June by the China Internet Network Information Center that said Baidu was the traffic leader at 51.5% to Google’s 32%. Baidu is, however, particularly popular for its search of downloadable music files.

According to Reporters Without Borders 32 journalists are currently imprisoned in China.

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Reporters Without Borders Continues Damning Cisco - November 1, 2006

Press freedom groups have long criticised American Internet technology company Cisco for selling its servers and other equipment to China, because the groups believe the Chinese use that technology to restrict Internet press freedom. And companies like Yahoo and Microsoft are criticized for obeying Chinese policies that can lead Chinese authorities to surfers who might be adding material onto the Internet that the authorities oppose.

Reporters Without Borders and other groups raised that criticism again in a heated discussion this week at a UN Internet Governance forum in Athens. Cisco and Microsoft were clearly in the minority in trying to fight back the criticism. 

Microsoft’s legal representative basically said that companies had to abide by Chinese law and various rules and regulations if they wanted to do business in China. Catherine Trautmann, a former French culture minister, countered that companies should consider what is more important – markets laws or freedom of expression?

A Cisco spokesman said the company had not customised any of its routers so that Chinese authorities could easily adapt them to block certain Internet addresses. “It’s the same equipment that we sell in every country around the world in which we sell equipment.” said Art Reilly, the company’s senior director for strategic technology policy.

Chinese representatives said the discussion was pointless, anyway, because there was no net censorship in China.

Even In China, The Internet is Hitting Hard at Newspaper Ad Revenue - April 20, 2006

For two decades China’s newspapers enjoyed annual revenue increases at rates higher than the country’s gross domestic product. But no more. Blame the Internet.

According to the 2006 edition of the Blue Book of China’s Media, newspaper ad revenues were down in 2005 by 15% compared with 2004, but at the same time Internet advertising revenues rose 77%.

Internet advertising in 2006 is expected to grow by some 23% over 2005, to reach 2.5% of the total advertising spend in China, still well below the average 6% or so in most western countries, but the writing is on the wall.

Even readership trends are looking similar to the West, according to CTR market research firm. Those newspaper readers younger than age 34 dropped by 1.7% whereas those readers over age 45 grew by 1.5%.