The rapid growth of China's economic and national strength has misled people into believing that it is a developed country. However, judging by the recent prison sentences handed down to New York Times researcher Zhao Yan (
According to the Measures for Administering the Release of News and Information in China by Foreign News Agencies issued on Sunday, the official Xinhua news agency will be both a key player and the sole referee in the media marketplace. The rules give a long list of "don'ts" for the foreign media, including not violating the Constitution or the nation's sovereignty, national security or religious policies. The foreign media has also been told not to promote evil cults, spread false information, disrupt the economy or undermine social stability.
Article 11 of the new regulations specifies that the foreign media shall not "undermine social ethics or the fine cultural traditions of the Chinese nation, or include other content banned by Chinese laws and administrative regulations."
The press restrictions are not only broad and indiscriminate, they are also supposed to apply to news agencies in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. If prohibited material is found in any reports from those areas, Xinhua can delete it. Xinhua can also give the offending agency a warning, demand a correction, suspend its release of specified materials or suspend or revoke the agency's permit for operating in China.
Of course, China's domestic news agencies have long been under Beijing's thumb and efforts to widen the scope of their reporting have usually been quickly quashed. Nevertheless, Sunday's pronouncement was a great step backward for China. The Hong Kong Journalists Association has protested the regulations, as have press associations and activists in many other countries.
With the keyword-based blocking of information from Web sites, including Google and Wikipedia, and e-mails, the strict regulations placed on foreign print media, the prohibition of wireless, cable and satellite TV and the new restrictions on foreign news agencies, the Chinese people are only able to see sanitized information that their government wants them to see.
Beijing has been fighting an uphill battle for several years to maintain the iron curtain it erected to keep foreign media from "poisoning" its people and eroding the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) grip on power.
While the new regulations have been widely -- and appropriately -- condemned, they also signal how desperate China's rearguard battle to defend its media "whiteout" has become. Its relations with the rest of the world are becoming closer by the day, its society is moving toward freedom and all-pervasive broadcasting technology is becoming more widespread. Technological advances are corroding the iron curtain even as China's rapid economic growth is driving it toward greater openness, internationalization and liberalization.
Political and social regression will not only hinder economic development, but create new social tensions. As the CCP works to expand its ties with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), perhaps it should pause to reflect on the latter's fate. The KMT imposed strict media controls in Taiwan for decades, but in the end could no longer hold back the flood of information that came with the country's economic and political development.
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