Repression Of Media, In China, Continues

Less than a year ago, the World Tibet Network News: Chinese go further, faster and higher with media crackdowns two years before Beijing Olympics (RWB) reported

When the Summer Olympic Games open in Beijing two years from today, on 8 August 2008, neither the Beijing Organising Committee (BOCOG) nor the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will be in a position to guarantee that the thousands of journalists covering the event will be able move about freely or write what they think, although the Chinese authorities promised they would.

Reporters Without Borders: Repression continues in China, one year before Olympic Games paints a more bleak picture, having started from 2001, when the IOC assigned the games to Beijing.

Six years later, nothing has changed. But despite the absence of any significant progress in free speech and human rights in China, the IOC’s members continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated appeals from international organisations that condemn the scale of the repression.

and continues with a mention of the government of President Hu Jintao

The departments of propaganda and public security and the cyber-police, all conservative bastions, implement censorship with scrupulous care.

The censorship is a very real problem today. This web site is hosted on Blogger, which is the personal website section of Google. People who need help with a Blogger blog write to the Blogger Help Forums, where every week we see problem reports such as Login Issues: blogger page won't load, or How Do I?: My blog can't be opened in china, reports from victims of the Great Firewall Of China. These are not isolated incidents.

The Chinese government has been coercing its ISPs to block various portions of Internet service for years; suspicion is that this condition will continue through the time of the Olympics. Advice given in Google Blogger Help is simple, and advises the victims of the Great Firewall Of China to use a proxy server, to access their blogs.

One well known proxy server is PKBlogs. PKBlogs has a very symbolic name, which stands for Pakistani Blogs. It was originally developed to deal with Pakistani governmental interference with the ISPs there. Besides being used in China and Pakistan, it's also been used in similar situations in India and in Thailand, and in one connectivity problem with ISPs in the UK.

This year, Lhadon Tethong of Students for a Free Tibet, is currently in Beijing, travelling to various sites around the city and writing a blog about her journies. She writes frequently of being followed by plain clothes men, who track her movements as she travels.

She writes of an attempt to meet with Olympic Commission President Jacques Rogge, and of the light security at his hotel, contrasting that to her hotel.

At the end of the long day, it was strangely comforting to return to our hotel and find no less than five plain-clothed security agents waiting for us in the lobby.

>> Top