The freedom of press is the cornerstone of freedom

Ran Yunfei, 9th May

Concerning the natures of holidays, I haven’t deeply studied. But one intent of holidays is to commemorate the people or events that passed away in order to remind us of not forgetting them or to learn from their either spirits or sorrowfulness. Another purpose is to set a goal toward which the current society could make progress, just as in 1993 United Nations established 3 May to be the “World Press Freedom Day”. However, one of the common paradoxes is that usually what we talk about the most is usually what we know the lest. World Press Freedom Day is actually such a paradox that, that you declare it is because the freedom of freedom has not been fully-fledged. Thus we need to mark a day out as the day for press freedom in the hope of keeping the world awoke of the fact that many reporters are still faced up to the threat of imprisonment and death.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was pubilicized 60 years ago, China’s own constitution has also been part of it openly committing itself to the freedom of press and speech. But the degree of press freedom in China is so poor that it’s obvious to all. The recent evaluation of human rights covers 195 countries regarding the degree of press freedom, among which 70 enjoys such freedom and 61 partially. China is one of the remainder which dispossesses the freedom of press. Furthermore, in the list of 10 countries where blogs could not be posted freely, China ranks eight—winning this “honor” together with Cuba, North Korea and Myanmar. Along with the thriving of intent and the resulting growth of bloggers, according to statistics, among the people who are imprisoned due to unfreedom of press, bloggers account for 45%. The recent cases, such like Wang Shuai in Henan Province, Wu Baoquan in Inner Mongolia Province, Deng Yonggu in Sichuan Province as well as Peng Yongsheng in Hubei Province, are all that in which informants are imprisoned due to to reporting of government corruption and competition for interests with normal people. While these cases are a little different to some extent, they are all entitled fabricated “defaming government”. They ridiculously take government as something you could not criticize and, even worse, as an individual entity that when there is no litigant to sue, the procuratorial organ transgresses to bring in an indictment, playing a role of pawns for the government.

The news media are commonly referred as the fourth power in the West, exerting an indispensable function of monitor on the three other national mechanisms, namely, judicature, administration and legislation. The core of press freedom is comprised of, firstly, free competition of press, and, secondly, independence and objectivity, and, thirdly, freedom of speech. Without these three points, freedom of press is only a moon in the mirror or a flower reflected in the water. Currently all media in China are state owned (even though those relatively liberalized), news are gravely homogeneous and unified; one voice or one angle usually represents all reporting of news with, sometimes, advocacy of “main rhythm” (the rhythm of lord). Such situation could not nourish a real competition of press. In other words, the media across the whole China are Party-produced: the Department of Propaganda gives directive and indicative notification to the press almost every day before publishing, in order to kill the truth. Under such situation how could we hope for independence or objectivity? Without freedom of speech, for instance, the constraint on searching for privacy information in Xu Zhou (I am not against the protection of normal people’s privacy, but concerning the privacy of governors, we should protect the means by which normal people search for truth under the condition that their right of privacy is not encroached), and requirement of real-name-login-blogger, prohibition of unkind review as well as prohibition of mocking or making fun of the “fake justice” of the governors, all these are 100 percent constraints on the freedom of speech. Without such freedom of speech as the origin of freedom, any other forms of freedom including press freedom are only nouns written on paper.

The Chinese government is someone whose walk doesn’t conform to whose talk: if one hundredth of what the government has spoken well of praised itself after 1949 could be realized, China would be a paradise jealousy by all. But all these are just an unobtainable utopia. Every year, they exalt themselves unlimitedly, on one hand, and keep making empty promises for decades, on the other. It has far already institutionalized in China’s constitution that freedoms of speech, press, and publishing and others are protected, yet these legislated words have never been fulfilled. As a consequence, that even under the protection of constitution legislations like “National Plan on Human Rights Movement” are introduced will not be believed: it’s only another obvious bigger lie. Right in the middle of the days “National Plan on Human Rights Movement”, all sorts of events are being on stage in China in which human rights are encroached; even the particularly emphasized revealing of the names of deaths in last year’s earthquake has not shown any sign of revealing, instead the volunteer group led by Ai Weiwei are still going through hardship—hindered by the local governments—in collecting truth of the students killed in earthquake. When the government is encroaching human rights of us, one way of their performance resembles thieves crying “stop thief”; but there are high-ranking governors ashamedly claiming that China is the best country in terms of human rights protection. The history has told us that, unless achievement of the real freedom of press or unleash the prohibition of newspaper (TV, radio, internet and suchlike), the dawn of freedom will never come.

We are not scared of government anymore

Yunfei Ran

The memorial anniversary for the dead in 12 May earthquake last year is coming up, and I started to read the book how we are now: dictation from the survived in 12 May earthquake (2009, Sichuan Art Publisher) authored by my friends Yin Bo and Wang Guoping and photographed by Chen Wei; with more suffering specifics read I could not help weeping again. In the course of the past year, the things of goodness and badness that I have experienced, seen, and heard are so sorrowful and unforgettable. I admit that in comparison to Tang Shan earthquake in 1976, the way this earthquake was dealt with shows gradual changes in both the society and the government. I strongly condemn, however, the government for hesitating to publicize the real amount of deaths and their names, and for not allowing the families of dead students to investigate the shoddy schools, which results in an ineffective investigation and eradiation of the element of man-made disaster. Since our government is not elected by the people, in many facets it lags far behind those highly politically civilized; covering up for the shoddy schools that caused many student deaths heightens our grief and indignation to a particular extent of intolerableness.


Both ridiculous and burlesque is the fact that government keeps the real number of victims and their names as national secret and holds it from the public. That parents whose kids were dead are not allowed to defend their rights through legal means in order to ascertain where the responsibility lies resembles trampling upon the laws; Mr. Huang Qi who helps parents defend their rights was jailed and no public trial has been conducted so far. As opposed to the Government’s shyness of releasing the names of student victims, a non-governmental investigation group led by Ai Weiwei has been working on it through their own effort, but they have encountered a variety of hindrances, threats, beating-up as well as illegal imprisonment from local governments. Another person who has taken pains to investigate the number of student deaths was put into jail already, and so far there has been no governmental statement regarding his imprisonment. On the one hand, many people have not got due aid; on the other, misreporting of the amount of relief materials has appeared to different degree in the process of post-disaster reconstruction (Mr. Deng Yonggu in Peng Xi was imprisoned due to revealing that local government falsely and illegally claimed relief materials). On the one hand, many problems exist in post-disaster reconstruction; on the other, however, the contributions of NGOs to reconstruction have been clamped down on. Simultaneously, concerns from people across the whole country about the truth have been also suppressed, detained and blocked, which harms the support for the people in disaster areas, but also counts against the effectiveness of monitoring the government in post-disaster reconstruction.


But the government, please note: even under your high pressure, still there been many overseas media, volunteers and NGO that break through layers of blockage and com to report the truth about the shocked areas and make practical contribution within their abilities. Undoubtedly those covering the true news encompass some worldwide well-known media, but they are reported in English that many Chinese are unable to read. Whereupon, a translation association online has organized a group to interpret the news regarding Sichuan’s earthquake. So far, they have translated 107 articles, and made their indispensable dedication to informing Chinese people of how overseas media have reported the earthquake. Yesterday I read one of their articles translated from Los Angeles Times named Parents hounded after child dies in China earthquake, in which voice from a parent—Wang Zhangting—from Mian zhu was mentioned. “They pressure us. They try to control us,” said Wang. “But even if they kill us, it doesn’t matter because…we are not scared of the government anymore.” His word upsets me. One of the old Chinese maxims says “people not sacred of death, why scaring them with death”, but it seems that the Communist Party doesn’t believe it who exalts scientific thought of development and its governing according to law every day. As a matter of fact, the efforts to defend the rights of their children and themselves have been underestimated by many governors: they failed to notice that the parents take their children’s lives as everything of their own. This is just like, regarding the fact that recently the Government has more and more suppressed the efforts of people legally defending their rights and put them into jail by illegal means, my friends Ding depicts it with on sentence “if we are not in the jail, we are on the way to it.” When people are in contempt of jails, when jails are gradually filled up with people, what is the use of them? It is the same with the Golden Shield project, one functioning as the “Great Wall” in preventing people from knowing truths; when more and more netizens start jumping over the wall, it will collapse naturally.

Several days in a dinner, I was indignant with the media of Sichuan including Chengdu at their nonfeasance or dys-feasance. In such a great disaster, we haven’t seen any medium standing out and daring to speak of truth, nor a media reporter worthy of being remembered, that even a claim of ashamedness on us Sichuan people is deserved. Formerly, I was proud of being a Sichuan person, but after this earthquake, I have seen the timidity of us and even impudence of some. Those persecuting the investigation group led by Ai Weiwei, for instance, are both timid and shameless (inarguably those behind them manipulating them are worse). We, Sichuan people, have not merely suffered from natural disasters but also from man-made poisons. What is worse is that when others come to help us, we don’t welcome them with gratitude but pay them with insult and beat who have come from a great distance, conscienceless! The word “victim” has been prohibited to appear in any media of Sichuan, the proposal by Chengdu Evening Newspaper to mourn for one minute in anniversary of the earthquake has been also turned down by Propaganda Department, such Sichuan people, such Sichuan governors, if we don’t criticize if we don’t combat, aren’t we willing to swallow the insults? If we keep silent, how could we give an answer to the compatriots killed in the disaster?