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.