Print

Mail

wiki links

China's new media rules condemned

International press groups and activists denounced new Chinese curbs on the dissemination of foreign news as a step backwards ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when thousands of journalists will descend on the country's capital.

The official Xinhua news agency announced rules on Sunday requiring foreign media to seek its approval with immediate effect to distribute news, pictures and graphics within China.

Warning against dissemination of news that endangers national security, sabotages national unification or promotes cults, the rules empower Xinhua to censor reports distributed in China by foreign media.

The rules also seek to bar international financial information companies, including Reuters and Bloomberg, from selling news services directly to Chinese customers such as banks and brokerages.

"These new regulations on the distribution of foreign news are a step backward," Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement.

"It is greatly distressing that less than two years before the start of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the government is attempting to tighten its financial and political control over the flow of information in China," he said.

"These measures are an authoritarian attempt to control news and information dissemination and the access of China's users to uncensored news and information," Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, said in a statement.

Hom said they could deprive Chinese society of information necessary to address corruption and social problems, obstructing efforts to create a more accountable government. She said the rules also violate Beijing's pledge to let reporters freely cover the 2008 Summer Games.

"These latest measures sound a wake-up call to the international community that a closed, state-controlled Olympics is on the horizon," she said.

The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders called for a joint reaction from the US, European and Japanese governments to China's attempt to curb the free flow of information.

"It is outrageous that Xinhua, the Communist Party mouthpiece, should claim full powers over news agencies," the group said. "Xinhua is establishing itself as a predator of both free enterprise and freedom of information.

"Part of Xinhua's motive seems to be [to] muscle in on a lucrative business that has eluded it until now," the group said, adding that the rules were a "complete violation of China's commitments to the World Trade Organization."

Foreign media companies have long been barred from selling general news services directly to Chinese media. However, foreign media companies have been allowed to sell financial news services directly to Chinese banks, brokerages and companies.

On Monday the EU criticized the curbs as a "very negative development" and vowed to raise the issue in human rights talks with Beijing.

"Any kind of restrictions on the freedom of the press, increasing the intervention of the state, is a very negative development," said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

China's parliament is also deliberating a bill that would fine domestic and foreign media if they broke news on natural disasters and other emergencies without authorization.
This story has been viewed 1619 times.