China imposed a widespread ban on coverage of last week’s high-speed train crash, forcing newspapers across the country to scrap pages of stories, a Hong Kong newspaper reported yesterday.
The Sunday Morning Post said that Chinese propaganda authorities issued a censorship order late on Friday, banning all coverage of the crash “except positive news or information released by the authorities.”
The ban came after state media published rare criticism of the government over its response to the July 23 crash, which killed at least 40, injured almost 200 and called into question the fast expansion of China’s high-speed rail network.
Photo: AFP
“After the serious rail traffic accident on July 23, overseas and domestic public opinions have become increasingly complicated,” the order from the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) said, according to the Post.
“All local media, including newspapers, magazines and Web sites, must rapidly cool down the reports of the incident. [You] are not allowed to publish any reports or commentaries, except positive news or information released by the authorities,” it said.
The sudden ban sent to newspaper and Web editors forced the China Business Journal to scrap eight pages of its paper, the Post reported, while the 21st -Century Business Herald had to scrap 12 and the Beijing News nine.
The papers had planned special coverage to mark the seventh day after the disaster, the report said. Xinhua news agency was forced to warn subscribers not to use a report it had issued.
The apparent ban was the second since the fatal crash, after propaganda authorities a day after the accident forbade local journalists from questioning the official line, according to the US-based China Digital Times.
That order appeared to be widely ignored, with a comment piece in the CCP mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, on Thursday arguing that China “needs development, but does not need blood-smeared GDP.”
After Friday’s reported order, angry journalists and editors published the spiked pages on the Twitter-like service Weibo, the Post reported, complaining they were forced to concoct other stories to fill the empty pages at the last moment.
“I was ordered to write something to fill up the empty pages at 10pm. At midnight I could no longer control myself and cried,” one reporter was quoted by the newspaper as writing.
The Hong Kong Journalists’ Association (HKJA) condemned the ban, saying it was not in line with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) pledge of an “open and -transparent” investigation when he visited the crash site last week.
“HKJA is appalled by such a move and demands that the -Chinese Communist Party’s -Propaganda Bureau withdraw this directive and allows the media to report the truth freely,” it said in a statement issued late on Saturday. “We urge premier Wen to personally follow up on this issue.”
The association — which -represents 500 journalists in semi--autonomous Hong Kong, which enjoys rights not seen elsewhere in China — urged media to continue reporting on the crash “so that the whole world will know what is going on.”
Analysts last week predicted a clampdown on Chinese state media and possibly also on Weibo, where furious Web users have vented their views since the crash.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.