Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Friday released Chinese internal memos and directives to protest the recent conviction of veteran Chinese journalist Gao Yu (高瑜), which revealed that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) speech delivered on Double Ten National Day last year was banned from being reporting by media in China.
“All Web sites, including mobile news clients, must delete Ma Ying-jeou’s 10/10 speech,” the documents on instructions of censorship and propaganda showed.
The documents released on the Web site of the Paris-based organization also revealed that the Chinese Communist Party ordered all books written by Chinese-American academic Yu Ying-shih (余英時), and Taiwanese novelist and director Giddens Ko (柯景騰), known as Jiu Ba-dao (九把刀), be removed from shelves.
It was reported in October last year that publishers in China received a notice from authorities to ban the work of Yu and Ko, who both showed support for the Sunflower movement in March and April last year in Taiwan. However, then-Minister of Council for Cultural Affairs Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) refused to confirm the reports.
Along with the instructions shown in the documents were “problems” reported to the Chinese State Internet Information Office under China’s Ministry of Public Security, including one involving Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service.
Sina Weibo was criticized for changing the title “Hong Kong version of Color Revolution deemed to fail” without authorization and incorporating other information in the story in a way that showed support for the Occupy Central movement.
Reporters Without Borders released the documents soon after Gao was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for “disclosing state secrets.”
It was a form of protest against the sentence and to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government’s attempts to control news and information, it said.
The documents — which include censorship directives to news media, memos circulated within Internet companies that cooperate with the censors, and summaries of meetings — testify to the scale of the party’s efforts to shape public opinion in accordance with its political vision, Reporters Without Borders said.
“We are appalled by this verdict and sentence, which ignored the proof of Gao Yu’s innocence supplied by her lawyers,” Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific desk head Benjamin Ismail said in the statement.
In Taipei, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chiu Chih-wei (邱志偉) said the widespread suppression of freedom of expression in China highlighted the importance of people-to-people exchanges across the Taiwan Strait.
Constructive people-to-people exchanges between Taiwan and China would allow Chinese to form their own opinions about Taiwan and compare them with how it has been portrayed differently in Chinese media, Chiu said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Apollo Chen (陳學聖) said he was not surprised at the media ban imposed on Ma’s Double Ten National Day speech.
Chen called on the government to place media exchanges high on the cross-strait agenda by granting landing rights to Chinese satellite television channels on a reciprocal principle to allow Chinese audiences to be exposed to Taiwanese news events.
The impacts Chinese media would have on the Taiwanese audience would be much less of a concern, Chen said.
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