A US congressional commission has been told that China’s growing financial presence in Taiwan may be damaging the country’s press freedom.
The warning came from Madeline Earp, an official with the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) during testimony she gave on Thursday to a US-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on China’s media and information controls.
“Journalists from Hong Kong and Taiwan have told CPJ they fear China’s increasing economic influence in their respective territories may be eroding the freedoms that exist there now,” she told the commission.
Earp said her organization was “very worried about signs of creeping repression” that seemed to be spreading from China.
Phelim Kine, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: “Recently, it appears that Hong Kong journalists in particular have been the target of a disproportionate amount of harassment.”
Earp added that a female journalist from Taiwan had told CPJ that she was aware of “creeping self-censorship.”
Earp said the self-censorship was not actually imposed directly by China, “but there is an awareness that certain stories can affect China and that might interfere with the growing economic relationship” between China and Taiwan.
Kine said: “Journalists understand that these are businesses they work for and these businesses often have links to China and there are lines they should not cross.”
He said that self-censorship in countries under Chinese influence was well known: “It is de facto, and it is a huge problem.”
In an interview after the hearing, Earp said that the CPJ was actively trying to gather examples of self-censorship in Taiwan and was “watching the situation.”
Earp said she believed that under “the increasing rapport” between Taiwan and China, certain stories would be handled more and more “delicately.”
Earlier, she told the commission: “The United States and the international community need China to step up to its role as a modern industrialized nation. The free flow of information domestically and internationally from China does not meet global norms.
“Reporting on disease outbreaks, economic conditions, market and trading information, and, of course, issues of corruption and human violations — virtually any subject that might highlight shortcomings in the political system and cause embarrassment to the government — remains a legitimate target of suppression in the eyes of the government’s vast censorship system.
“Even more important than the treatment of American and other foreign journalists in China is the threat the domestic censorship regime poses to the free exchange of information, which the US relies on,” she said.
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