The internet is a powerful ally for journalists in China who face censorship, sacking, arrest and assault. Mary-Anne Toy looks at the complexities of Chinese media.

The limits of press freedom are being challenged regularly, stealthily and sometimes openly by China’s journalists and netizens, but the penalties can be high. Wu Xianghu, deputy editor of the Taizhou Evening News, died from injuries sustained after being bashed by police for refusing to retract a police corruption story last October.

The head of the Jiajiang district traffic police had turned up at the newspaper offices to demand a public apology. When the journalist refused, the police chief, Li Xiaoguo, called in 30 to 50 police who seized Wu, dragging and pushing him into a police car watched by dozens of witnesses.

Wu, 41, who had chronic liver problems and had had a transplant in 2003, never recovered from the bashing, which injured his new liver and damaged his kidneys and bowel. In February, four months after the attack, he died in hospital. The traffic chief was sacked and relieved from his Communist Party duties, but no criminal charges have been laid.

In Hunan province, Yan Xiaoqing is awaiting trial on extortion charges after reporting on corruption by local officials in property sales. Yang, his family and other reporters say he is innocent and the extortion charges were cooked up after he exposed that Longhui officials sold off a state-owned food plant and paper mill to business associates. Yang’s lawyers say he will be unable to get a fair trial as the prosecutors answer to the same Longhui officials.

China’s liberal intellectuals have been watching with dismay the tightening of controls on free speech in the past year. Editors from four of the country’s most outspoken newspapers have been sacked for challenging the official government line on everything from historic interpretations to bad English translations.

The suppression of early reporting of the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in late 2002 was considered to be the low point of media freedom post Tiananmen Square. When the new leadership team of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao came to power in 2003, one of the first things they did was dump the by then untenable official denials of SARS. But while Hu and Wen were winning plaudits for their common sense and their support of press freedom, other arms of the state were working to remind journalists of their limitations.

Three senior journalists of the campaigning southern China newspaper that helped expose the SARS cover-up were jailed on what many journalists say were trumped-up corruption charges as payback for embarrassing the government over SARS and revealing the beating to death of a graphic artist in police custody.

Two of the journalists of the Southern Metropolitan Post (Nanfang Dushi Bao) remain in jail, serving six and eight years.

However, these are the cases where the censor system failed. For most journalists, censorship is an everyday part of their job. Self-censorship is encouraged by the system through regular ideological training sessions for journalists, but to make sure, there are daily instructions issued by the Central Propaganda Department of the party and its provincial departments. Editors can get a dozen or more such calls during a day.

The directives can be issued by phone, SMS or fax, usually to senior managers and editors who are then responsible for disseminating the information to reporters or censoring reports before publication.

The big taboos include reporting the three Ts – Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet – senior leaders, the military, religion, Falun Gong and other dissident issues as well as government corruption and incompetence.

This doesn’t mean the topics aren’t discussed, but only certain perspectives are allowed. The directives can ban an entire subject, dictate what angles are acceptable or even the timing of reports. For example, reporting on Tibet is confined to extolling the benefits of development or accusing the exiled Dalai Lama of fomenting trouble.

A Western journalist who worked at China Radio International’s English language channel was initially perplexed at why the English translations were so mangled; then he was shown an official list of translations of certain phrases deemed sensitive.

“Most were okay, but there were a whole heap of them that just literally didn’t make sense. It was very frustrating because you’d change things and they’d (the Chinese journalists) would say ‘yeah, but the official translation is...’, ” the Western journalist said.

Penalties for being too adventurous include self-criticism, which is considered shameful in Chinese society. A journalist must self-flagellate themselves in writing, they may have their pay docked, their colleagues’ pay docked or be sacked. It’s a system that discourages risk-taking.

Pope John Paul II’s death was not announced for more than a day as journalists, nervous over China’s testy relations with the Vatican (which recognises Taiwan), waited for direction from management.

Academic Ashley Esarey, in a study commissioned by Freedom House published in February, says the Chinese Communist Party has responded to the challenges posed by commercialisation of the media, growing journalist professionalism and the globalisation of information through the internet with a media crackdown. The Party is discouraging joint ventures with foreign media firms, tightening internet controls and promoting more frequent coercion of journalists.

Esarey says that although China’s 1982 Constitution guarantees “freedom of speech, publishing, assembly and the right to establish organisations, movements and protest” under Article 35, four other articles place severe limits on the exercise of those freedoms.

Article 51 states that freedoms cannot be exercised if they harm the collective interests of the nation, society or freedoms enjoyed by other citizens. Article 53 makes it illegal to reveal state secrets and Article 54 prohibits harming the “security, honour and interests of the motherland”.

“In practice, these articles have been manipulated by a self-interested, posttotalitarian regime to suppress politically undesirable forms of information,” Esarey says.

Despite these crackdowns there are healthy signs that the nation’s journalists are fighting back.

In Beijing this year, veteran investigative journalist Li Datong successfully took on the authorities in another media freedom case. In January the authorities shut down his outspoken Bingdian Weekly, a weekly supplement in the China Youth Daily, after it published an academic essay critical of the government’s one-sided version of historical events.

Following a public outcry, including a rare declaration by party elders such as Mao Zedong’s biographer and former propaganda chiefs, the government allowed Bingdian (known in English as “Freezing Point”) to reopen in March, but sacked Li Datong and his deputy in a face-saving measure.

Though initially furious, Li quickly came to realise that Bingdian’s unexpected reopening – with the rest of its staff intact and the appointment of a respected senior journalist to replace him – was a victory, despite his own sacking.

In an interview a few days before Bingdian was to be allowed to resume publication, Li was chain-smoking his way through a packet of Hunan Province’s finest cigarettes. The provenance of the cigarettes is a small example of the kind of popular support that crusading newspapers are gaining. A Bingdian reader, who assumed the closure meant all the journalists would be left jobless, dropped off two cartons of the cigarettes and 10,000 yuan in cash at the newspaper office, then disappeared before anyone could speak with him.

Once the reader might have been right, but this time even Li and his deputy were not left jobless; they were transferred to ‘research’ on a lesser salary.

Li says the media is often the last resort for citizens fighting corruption and injustice, and that serious journalists have a responsibility to investigate and report on substantiated complaints.

“[The propaganda chiefs] hate that I can be interviewed by foreign media and tell the truth. But for the moment there’s nothing they can do about it,” he says.

That he would be virtually left untouched by the authorities would have been unimaginable 10 years ago, and the fact that Bingdian managed to avoid closure (apart from a one-edition suspension a few years back) for 11 years reflects what Li says is the unstoppable liberalisation of Chinese society.

China’s state-owned newspapers now rely heavily on sales for their income and have found that the public are less and less willing to buy propaganda – China Youth Daily’s circulation has dropped from about three million to 400,000 over the past 20 years.

The demand for real news has given China’s increasingly bold journalists the ammunition to fight the censors, and the most powerful ally journalists have is the internet. Yet companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have been criticised for greeing to comply with Chinese laws in order to operate here.

An estimated 80 journalists and cyber dissidents are in jail or awaiting charges. At least four of these cases involve internet writers being sentenced based on information provided by Yahoo!, which is accused of handing over email account details. Hong Kong’s Office of Privacy commissioner is investigating the case of journalist Shi Tao, who is serving a 10-year sentence after Yahoo! Hong Kong allegedly handed over incriminating evidence.

The New York-based rights group, Human Rights in China, has just revealed details of another dissident, Wang Xiaoning, who was sentenced to 10 years in jail more than two years ago for distributing essays advocating multi-party democracy on the internet. The rights group says evidence cited in Wang’s judgment included information provided by Yahoo! Holdings Hong Kong.

In May, the New York Times reported how Shanghai Normal University had recruited 500 students to go online and police university internet forums by introducing innocuous subjects, steering conversations in politically correct directions and reporting offensive material for deletion. But despite innovative and intense policing – estimated at 30,000 to 50,000 internet ‘police’ spread across four government departments – many believe it is an impossible task.

Hong Kong’s media – the South China Morning Post and others – and foreign media remain a key conduit for news that is unable to be published on the mainland. Although websites such as the BBC are banned, many others are still freely available – or if not, can be accessed through various proxy methods – and controversial articles are also distributed quickly via email mailing lists.

A handful of internet muck-rakers are using personal blogs to publish what mainstream media can’t. Despite the army of internet censors, nimble bloggers can move to fresh sites quickly.

“I can spread news across the whole country in just 10 minutes, while the propaganda officials are still wondering what to do,” Li Xinde, who exposes corruption and injustice through his China Public Opinion Surveillance Net, told Reuters recently.

As a counterpoint, while the government is committed to promoting internet usage, albeit censored, it has also been assiduously extending state radio and television to every peasant household in the land. The government sees television, in particular, as a means of unifying the nation, especially when the message can be more effectively vetted.

Mary-Anne Toy is the China correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers.