A forum on cross-strait media issues held in China late last year was an outright insult to the autonomy of Taiwanese media because Beijing forced participating media outlets to endorse a six-point proposal for media issues.
The points included an exchange of media offices that many think would turn local media outlets into mouthpieces for China, especially as the heads of state-owned media outlets such as the Central News Agency and the Public Television Service participated in the forum.
It is little wonder that the forum attracted international attention, sparking debates about whether Taiwan is becoming a second Hong Kong.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration was also criticized for being stupid beyond belief because it knows full well that China has no press freedom.
Without any response plan in place, the media will end up being manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) like a puppet on a string.
There are no two ways about it. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is particularly tough when it comes to media control.
The new “Three Anti Campaign,” aimed at people opposed to the CCP, the state and ethnic Chinese, and Xi’s “Seven Speak-nots,” which prohibit talking about universal values, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, citizen’s rights, civic society, past party mistakes and China’s new elite, are all aimed at strangling the media.
In addition, journalists cannot republish or cite reports from overseas news sources on microblogging Web sites without permission from the authorities.
The recent incident involving a journalist from the Xinkuai Daily (新快報), Chen Yongzhou (陳永洲), who had his head shaved and was forced to admit his alleged mistake, clearly demonstrates how the CCP kills a chicken to scare the monkey by making examples of those who break its rules.
In its report on press freedom last year, US-based watchdog Freedom House president David Kramer said China is still listed as lacking a free press and that this lack extends beyond its own borders, as China censors and filters news from other countries.
This is exemplified by the case of the 24 New York Times and Bloomberg reporters who had trouble with their visa extensions and were harassed by Chinese authorities last year.
When former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) was in office, China focused on using economic means to spur unification, which included signing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, but Hu did not do much about the media.
Xi has been different. He has copied former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), and focused on controlling the media.
For example, he has used Mao’s tactic of besieging the enemy and striking at its reinforcements to isolate mainstream Taiwanese media, while also applying non-mainstream quantitative changes to influence the mainstream.
With Chinese-language media outlets in the US, China has employed a carrot-and-stick approach, sparing no expense in staging forums, lectures and symposiums to recruit the enemy.
Chinese author He Qinglian (何清漣) has mentioned in her work that this approach is a unification tactic based entirely on separation and integration aimed at forcing media outlets and their writers and editors into submission.
The best contemporary example of this is the cross-strait media forum.
The organizers refused to invite the Chinese-language Liberty Times and the Apple Daily, two major Taiwanese newspapers, to the event.
To fill up vacancies and make the event look more important, the Chinese organizers decided to invite large numbers of people not directly linked to media issues.
Organizers also invited the heads of Taiwanese state-owned media outlets, who by attending tacitly approved of China’s actions, thus making it a highly alternative type of endorsement for China and its unification goal.
Obviously, until the Ma administration has a better strategy for dealing with cross-strait media issues, it must be careful, otherwise it will find itself in a trap.
At the moment, the best way to deal with these issues would be to refer to the press freedom guarantee agreement drawn up by the Association of Taiwan Journalists and Taiwan Democracy Watch and put those principles into practice.
Lu I-ming is a former publisher and president of Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News.
Translated by Drew Cameron
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past