Tom Phillips - China seeks to eradicate 'vile effect' of independent journalism
Top Chinese internet
portals had been forbidden from producing original reporting on politically
sensitive topics in what experts say is the latest step in President
Xi Jinping’s battle to bring Chinese journalism under control. Internet giants
including Netease, Sina and Sohu were ordered to pull the plug on their current
affairs operations on Monday, the Cyberspace Administration ofChina (CAC), Beijing’s
internet watchdog announced.
Such independent
journalism had “seriously violated regulations and had a completely vile
effect,” the watchdog’s Beijing operation said, according
to Reuters. Citing a CAC official,
the Global Times, a Beijing-controlled tabloid, said online portals were
permitted to publish stories on “social and political
issues” only if they had been sourced from government-controlled news
agencies. Law enforcement
against such websites would be “enhanced”, the official warned.
The move was widely
interpreted as the latest step in the Communist party’s bid to bring China’s
already tightly controlled media to heel. It comes just over
five months after Xi made a
high-profile tour of state media outlets in Beijing, demanding
“absolute loyalty” from their journalists and instructing them to serve as
“disseminators of the Party’s policies and propositions”.
Qiao Mu, a journalism
professor from Beijing’s Foreign Languages University, said online portals had
long been barred from publishing original news stories about politically
sensitives subjects.
Previously, however,
the enforcement of such regulations has been patchy. Qiao noted that moves
to enforce the rules on current affairs reporting came just weeks after the
head of China’s internet regulator, Lu Wei, was unexpectedly
removed from his post. He was replaced as the country’s censor-in-chief by Xu
Lin, who worked alongside Xi when he was the Communist party chief in
Shanghai, almost a decade ago.
“The new boss just
took office and has to do something new,” Qiao said. Qiao said he also
believed recent news events in China – including deadly
floodingand an international tribunal’s rejection
of Chinese claims in the South China Sea– meant Beijing was nervous about
losing control of the media narrative. “This has not been a
quiet summer … authorities are worried that [such] reporting might have an
effect on social stability,” he said.
Wen Tao, a Chinese
journalist who worked for one of the current affairs services that has been
closed down, told
the New York Times censors would find it hard to completely control
the production of news. “The flow of
information cannot be stopped – it’s like a flood,” he said. Qiao, the journalism
professor, said he expected further moves from the Communist party as it fought
to rein in the media.
“This is just getting
started. There will be more to come,” he predicted.
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