04 Aug 11 | Asia and Pacific, China
The aftermath of the collision of two high-speed trains near the Chinese city of Wenzhou on 23 July has demonstrated that the limits of free expression in China are being tested more than ever before. Government officials keen to stifle public criticism have faced a backlash from defiant reporters and netizens.
The authorities say the crash, which killed 40 and left 191 injured, was caused by faulty signals, but the disaster is proving to be a major headache for Beijing. The government has swung from suppressing information to pledging greater openness around “sudden-breaking events and problems of key concern to the people”.
As Alice Xin Liu wrote on this blog last week, within hours of reporting the disaster, journalists received directives from the Central Propaganda Department demanding positive coverage. Reporters were told to focus on “extremely moving” stories, within an overall theme of “great love in the face of great disaster”. They were ordered not to question or elaborate on the causes of the crash and reminded that “the word from the authorities is all-prevailing”.
These official weekly instructions are usually heeded. This time, however, journalists were not as submissive.
A Saturday edition of the respected business paper, The Economic Observer, ran a nine-page feature with the headline, “No Miracles in Wenzhou”. The accompanying editorial was written in the form of a letter to a two-year-old girl found alive in the wreckage 21 hours after the crash, and several hours after rescue efforts were officially called off. Her discovery had earlier been deemed a “miracle” by a railway ministry spokesman. The editorial asked the child,
When you’re grown, will we and this country we live in be able to honestly tell you about all the love and suffering, anger and doubts around us?
Even the Communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, ran an editorial saying “we do not want a GDP that comes with blood”.
The Beijing News was less blatant. It ran a front-page article about the breakage of a Song dynasty bowl at a Beijing museum, with six shattered pieces representing the six derailed train carriages .
The authorities then attempted to rein in the media, asserting that “public opinion inside and outside China has begun to become complex”. Wang Qinlei, a producer for state broadcaster CCTV, was suspended over his programme 24 Hours, which featured footage of hospitalised victims and questioned whether the state was putting economic progress before its citizens’ welfare. Meanwhile, Chinese Business View was forced to pull three pages from its 29 July edition that had featured a variety of damning editorials, with one titled, “The Only Road to Rebuilding the Public’s Trust is to Seek Out the Truth”.
Alongside the refusal of state organs to tow the party line, officials have also had to manage an onslaught of anger and criticism from China’s internet users, who currently tip the scales at almost half a billion.
Users on Sina Weibo — China’s wildly popular answer to Twitter — furiously posted in their tens of millions, criticising the leaked propaganda directives and the government’s handling of the crash. 93 per cent of participants on a poll carried out by the microblog just days after the accident claimed they were “very dissatisfied” with the state’s response.
Public anger went into overdrive when footage emerged of officials apparently burying a train carriage soon after the crash. Accusations of a government cover-up poured in, with videos of the burial being posted across Chinese video-sharing websites. In response, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged a “thorough probe” into the crash.
What makes this tragedy — and its media fallout — all the more significant is that it is a display of precisely what Chinese journalists, netizens and the wider public had long feared and openly lamented: corruption scandals, questionable safety standards and an obsession with economic growth at the expense of the masses’ interests.
Combine these factors and the Communist Party is left under greater pressure than ever to speed up its political reform and put the brakes on its intense economic growth. Just how quickly or effectively this balance will be addressed remains to be seen, but the government’s authoritarian model of dealing with ever-expanding social forces is proving shaky. An increasingly defiant body of journalists and trailblazing netizens who are asserting their right to know, to express and to critique.
The authorities might hope public anger will cool but the Wenzhou tragedy caps a long sequence of attempts to cover up scandals — from tainted milk to fatally shoddy construction — and contain a fallout of public opinion that could damage the Communist Party’s legitimacy as the voice of authority. Having now been catapulted by such a poignant disaster that taps into several facets of public discontent, it is doubtful that this novel pressure for a more open media system in mainland China will ease anytime soon.
26 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
In the days since Anders Behring Breivik — the accused perpetrator of Friday’s deadly attacks in Norway — has been identified as a Christian right-wing extremist, some liberals in the US have descended on the episode as another opportunity to draw a straight line between hard-right political causes and actual violence. The meme has been gaining steam since the early rise of the Tea Party, a group that occasionally celebrates its Second Amendment gun rights by toting weapons to public rallies.
“Norway, US, Worldwide — is Right-Wing Violence endemic?” asks a blog post on the popular liberal Internet enclave Fire Dog Lake. Explains the writer:
“Right-wing supporters, here in the US and around the world, have a long history of resorting to, or actually embracing, violence. People from politicians, to preachers to doctors have all been shot because of their perceived (and perhaps real) left leaning political views.”
The author then proceeds to compile a list of recent incidents involving right-wing violence, including mention of the January shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
ThinkProgress, a liberal blog affiliated with the progressive Center for American Progress, has published an oddly beside-the-point revelation that the “Norway Terrorist is a Global Warming Denier“, as if this contributes further damning evidence of the ideological similarity between mass murderers and run-of-the-mill conservatives. In another post, the blog cites “evidence that [Breivik] was a fan of far-right bloggers and political parties.”
It then uses the occasion to chastise Rep. Peter King, who has refused to include homegrown terrorism threats – read: threats from neo-Nazis and other domestic right-wing extremists — in his congressional hearings investigating the radicalisation of American Muslims. King, since the Norway attacks, has held to that position.
Of course, it would be preferable for King to abandon the hearings all together rather than to add domestic political partisans to his already dubious investigation of the Muslim community. But the hint of “endemic” right-wing violence poses a different challenge – and that’s that we head down a tricky path in trying to draw systemic conclusions about political ideology and specific incidents of bloodshed.
It’s possible — as has turned out to be the case with Giffords’ shooter — that the defining characteristic of Breivik and other such violent rogues isn’t their politics, but their mental instability. And conflating the two could be problematic for political speech in the long run.
Sarah Palin was widely indicted after the Giffords shooting, which left six dead in an Arizona strip-mall parking lot, for having produced a map of political opponents targeted in the 2010 election with gun-sight symbols over their districts. Pundits speculated that such a map could have motivated Jared Lee Loughner to take Palin’s suggestion literally. (Subsequently, there was no evidence Loughner ever even saw Palin’s campaign graphic.)
Since then, Americans have been struggling mightily with the consequences of political discourse, with what it means to be “civil” at a time of rising political acrimony, and with the murky causal connection between words, ideas and violent action. It’s an important discussion. But chalking up the Norway shooting as another example that “right-wing ideas = violence” doesn’t add much to it.
Joshua Foust, writing in The Atlantic, is equally firm on this point:
“In order to tar all of Europe’s right, even just the upsetting xenophobes clothing themselves in worry about jihad, you must demonstrate a causal mechanism by which concern over cultural outsiders becomes murderous rage against the very people you claim to protect (in this case, ethnic Norwegians). Without being too trite, it requires an especially deranged mind already far outside the mainstream to decide to slaughter children at summer camp just because it is run by a left-wing political party. Associating that sort of mentality with the mainstream is not just wrong and lazy, it is hypocritical.
Indeed, much of the Western’s left’s quasi-triumphalism over the Norwegian tragedy revolves around it’s complete non-relationship to Islamic terror. Here, so many seem to celebrate, is the proof they had finally sought that right-wing politics are not just annoying and wrong, but actively dangerous.”
That argument may be politically profitable in the short term. But in the long run, suggesting political beliefs — whether liberal or conservative — are synonymous with incitement to violence could wind up undermining the rights of even those making such an argument today.
11 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
Omar al-Bashir’s government is determined to control the news media, says Abdelgadir Mohammed Abdelgadir
(more…)
01 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
As the rest of the world’s governing bodies and opinion polls have gradually come around to a consensus on climate change, the United States stands out as a particularly odd outlier: Supporters and deniers here have in fact grown further apart, with the issue more politically divisive today than it was just five years ago. Public concern about the climate has actually declined. Politicians who once acknowledged global warming have changed their minds. And in a particularly shocking vote earlier this spring, not one of the 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee would vote for an amendment simply acknowledging that climate change exists (which is the position of the government’s own scientific bodies).
In the midst of all this, an even stranger thing has happened — scientists themselves have become controversial figures, now routinely harassed, investigated and attacked for their research.
In a particularly high-profile case, Virginia’s elected attorney general has spent most of the past year trying to subpoena the state’s prestigious public university for the academic records of a climate scientist, Michael Mann, whom he accuses of defrauding the public for grant money to support his research. Mann has not worked at the University of Virginia since 2005.
The latest tactic, inspired by the Climategate email scandal, has been for non-governmental activist groups to file public records requests about individual researchers in the hunt for personal information to discredit them. One such group, the American Tradition Institute, last week sued NASA to obtain records on any ethics or disclosure violations by James Hansen, a top climatologist who blew the whistle on censorship of scientists during the Bush Administration.
The trend is distressing for each of the researchers who’ve become unwitting targets. But, more broadly, academic and scientific organisations increasingly worry that such tactics will have a much wider impact — intimidating the entire scientific community and deterring work on a crucial area of public inquiry.
Exasperated with this trend, one of the country’s most respected scientific organisations (and the world’s largest general scientific body), this week released a formal statement decrying all the harassment. The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science wrote:
“We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists. Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public. This both impedes the progress of science and interferes with the application of science to the solution of global problems. AAAS vigorously opposes attacks on researchers that question their personal and professional integrity or threaten their safety based on displeasure with their scientific conclusions.”
The scientific community has spent centuries perfecting the process of policing itself — peer review is designed to ferret out research fraud, and the revision and correction of earlier findings is a central element of the very idea of scientific progress.
All of this has been lost on aggressive climate deniers, who have been remarkably successful at creating the public impression of scientists as agenda-wielding partisans in a political war. For their part, cloistered researchers not used to communicating with the public have seemed baffled by attacks that can’t be repelled on data and evidence alone.
As the AAAS points out, the stakes go beyond even the implications for chilled speech. Because all of society will lose out when scientists are intimidated into staying away from climate research that’s needed to inform what we should do about the problem.
As the board put it:
“We are concerned that establishing a practice of aggressive inquiry into the professional histories of scientists whose findings may bear on policy in ways that some find unpalatable could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research that intersects with policy-relevant scientific questions.”
