China’s Shadowy Post-Publication Censors
In one of those pieces you wish The Wall Street Journal hadn’t locked behind its subscription wall, David Bandurski and Lin Hui describe the after-the-fact players in Mainland China’s censorship apparatus (yep, subscription required):
When the Chinese government closed down Freezing Point, the highly regarded weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily, China-watchers were shocked. What few outside observers understood, however, is that this move was not purely a throwback to a past era of censorship. Rather it was part of a relatively recent effort to reinforce the culture of self-censorship within an increasingly vibrant media sector. Spearheading this effort is a shadowy group of Communist Party officials entrusted with tremendous power and almost no accountability.
Known as the News Commentary Group (NCG), this is an elite team of about 10 retired propaganda czars, who wield influence far above their administrative rank. Many are regional editors in chief brought to the capital to clean house at major newspapers. They have crafted quaint monikers to describe themselves: “invisible teachers,” “stewards of the forest,” even “woodpeckers” (who dig out parasites). Their criticisms suggest a fondness for Cultural Revolution rhetoric: “These two articles contain serious political errors”; “We cannot promote economists who attack Marxism”; “We cannot promote a watered-down ideology that denies the media’s role as mouthpiece of the party.” Phrases like these may seem out of step with a globalizing China, but Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have all used extreme leftist elements to clamp down on “bourgeois liberal” tendencies. The agents of the NCG were behind many of China’s most notorious media crackdowns of recent years — the closure of upstart weekly Xin Zhou Bao, the jettisoning of Southern Weekend’s top editors, the recent takeover of Beijing News.
In fact, the NCG represents a new vision for propaganda work. Beijing is pursuing this strategy because of, not in spite of, market reforms. When the NCG celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2004, the deputy heads of the Propaganda Department issued a congratulatory statement on behalf of Politburo member Li Changchun, China’s top propaganda czar, and Liu Yunshan, head of the Central Propaganda Department (CPD): “Creating a system of news criticism was a reinvention of censorship for a new era.”
China’s present system of media censorship is unlike that employed by the Kuomintang in the early decades of the last century. The Kuomintang carried out advance checks on content: Officials pored over reports before they hit the presses. By contrast, China uses fewer advance checks but controls the media by enforcing self-censorship. The orders and bans issued by the Propaganda Department are a compass by which editors navigate. The NCG squad adds an important, unofficial layer of after-the-fact policing that some officials see as critical in an era of exploding media diversity.
….. Within the formal party structure, the NCG is an anomaly. It operates — nominally, at least — under the News Bureau of the Central Propaganda Department. It is comprised, however, almost exclusively of retired propaganda officials working on a temporary basis rather than formally employed, and despite its amorphous character, its influence far exceeds that of the various departments of the News Bureau. The reports of the NCG bypass standard reporting channels; they may rise to the upper echelons of the party or travel directly to propaganda offices or media in the provinces. In either case, criticisms can result directly in disciplinary action. With written instructions appended by the CPD, they might bring editorial shake-ups like the Southern Weekend case in 2001. Passing through ministries and commissions or provincial-level leadership, they might bring the closure of publications and the firing of editors, as with the closings of Freezing Point, Guangdong’s Tong Chuan Gong Jin magazine and Hubei’s Xin Zhou Bao newspaper.
The overall point, of course, is that government censorship is alive and well in China. As noted previously, the government makes sure before publication that media executives know “what news they should keep off their sites and what items they should highlight in the week ahead.” Combine that with what the Star Chamber-like NCG does to punish publications and journalists after the fact if they stray from party orthodoxy, and it becomes very clear that the government has very effective controls over the flow of news in place.
And if that’s not enough, don’t forget the search results censorship instituted by BizzyBlog Internet Wall of Shame member Google, the assistance with Internet security systems provided by fellow Wall of Shame member Cisco, and the willingness of yet another Wall of Shame member, Yahoo!, to cooperate with the police in apprehending and jailing dissident journalists. Behind the friendly veneer lies a government that still exercises a near-ironclad control of its people with, to their everlasting shame, the active assistance of Western technology companies.
