Mandarin: The Internet and civil rights in China

RFA Mandarin service reporter Wu Jing is currently airing an eight-part feature series on the Internet in China (ZH), and its role in the country’s civil rights movement. Here, she summarizes her programs in English, beginning with Part 1:

A magazine editor in Fujian province for example confesses that, staying online 12 hours everyday, he is in a state of being” possessed by the devil.” His online activities include almost everything from chatting to listening to music, watching movies, booking flight tickets, looking up maps, and to writing and publishing articles. The Internet has intruded his life so deeply and widely that he cannot imagine what life would be like without it.

The growth of the Internet in China in the past decade has been phenomenal in terms of both technology and user population. A conservative estimate of the Chinese Internet users is over 130 million that is one in ten people in China or one tenth of the Internet population in the world. The scale of the Internet development has brought about a wide spectrum of social changes including the expansion of civil rights for the Chinese people. This eight-part radio broadcast series discusses the Internet’s role in China’s social progress and covers topics of citizens’ right to know, freedom of speech, press freedom, rights movement and the legal path to rights achievement.

Part 1: The Internet and the citizens’ right to know

Part one of the series discusses how the knowledge and information explosion on the Internet pushes open the free access to information for the Chinese people and enhances their right to know.

Internet not only attracts millions in China everyday, but also has become their way of life. Statistics show that most of the Chinese “web people” spend about three hours daily on Internet for a wide-range and diversified activities. A magazine editor in Fujian province for example confesses that, staying online 12 hours everyday, he is in a state of being” possessed by the devil.” His online activities include almost everything from chatting to listening to music, watching movies, booking flight tickets, looking up maps, and to writing and publishing articles. The Internet has intruded his life so deeply and widely that he cannot imagine what life would be like without it. Mr. Wang, a youth in Shandong, says that young people are especially attracted to the Internet, and he himself has developed a habit of getting online first whenever he needs any kind of information. A businessman in Fujian also praises Internet not only for its quick and wide-ranged information, but also for its convenience which saves him the trouble of sifting through several newspapers just for a piece of information.

The information explosion on the Internet has revolutionary implications for the Chinese people’s right to know. As the ruling philosophy for the emperors in the past still lingering around that “People may be made to follow, but not be made to know,” information sharing by the government with its citizens remains poor in China even today. Hong Kong journalist Mai Yanting criticizes the Beijing authority for monopolizing social information and for only releasing some as it sees fit or as it thinks the citizens deserve to know. Furthermore, social information is divided into positive and negative news by the authorities who forbid reports on 29 categories of negative news, as revealed by one interviewee, including peasants’ petitions, land expropriation, riots, protest demonstrations, strikes and official-populace conflicts. A Hong Kong media in 2005 cites 12 pieces of major social news in that year blocked by the Beijing government, including the police massacre in Dongzhou village, Guangdong, leaving 14 villagers dead. However, as a Radio Free Asia reporter finds out, many villagers in neighboring villages had never heard of the incident and one even asked “Isn’t that the Dongzhou villagers kidnapped and killed several officials?” Besides current happenings, citizens’ right to know must also include knowledge of the past. But a student listener from Guangxi who writes to RFA for a program on CD on the 1989 Tiananmen Incident says that out of ten of his colleague classmates, “nine and half” of them don’t know what really happened in the incident.

However, student Xia Houyun writes on the Internet sharing how he and his university school mates and many students in other universities and even other provinces have down loaded a live video show of the Tiananmen incident. The Internet’s diversified way of channeling information also strengthens Radio Free Asia’s ability to inform its audience in China. To catch the breaking news, find witnesses and research on the backgrounds of events, the Internet is indispensable for RFA’s program design, production and delivery. The RFA website further expands its reach to the vast Chinese web population.