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.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS