Now, at this stage most looks rather positive, maybe with the exception of Tibet: a few foreign journalists have been called in by the headmaster of the ministry of foreign affairs after they went to Tibet without explicit permission. As far as I know this is the only place in China where all foreigners need permission to go to, and journalists a special one that is hard to get.
But otherwise, when journalists were detained for working in a region without explicit approval, one phone call from Beijing was enough to sort the local officials out.
Probably because their is not so much bad news to tell about the position of foreign journalists, in a strange twist now the position of Chinese journalists has become the issue.
"There is no justification for denying to Chinese journalists even the limited freedoms that their foreign colleagues enjoy," said Richardson. "If China is genuine about press freedom for the Olympics, it must also emancipate its own journalists."First, the Chinese government has never promised Chinese media would be treated equally as the foreign once, so it is hardly decent to say China is breaking its promises. Further, talking about press freedom in terms of giving journalists more rights is not really helping if the ownership relations in the traditional media do not change. (And I do not see that happening.)
Anyway, the editor generously allocated 250 words to explain this story to a largely ignorant audience.
This morning I was reading this translation by ESWN, an interview in Du Daozheng of Yanhuang Chunqiu and a beautiful example on how China's media are changing. No clue how to summarize that in 250 words.
1 comment:
The atmosphere in China for free expression is "men", meaning stifling/suffocatingly close. Don't look for any rapid changes in the barometer. The curtain was raised for economic aggrandizement, not to stimulate intellectual curiosity in a Western way. In this respect, not much has changed in several thousand years.
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