Reporters Without Borders published a survey entitled “The great leap back of journalism in China”, in which the NGO says to reveal “the scale of the regime’s campaign of repression against the right to information”, according to a statement. On franceinfo, the president of the NGO Christophe Deloire denounces the “terror” which allows “hold the media system”.
Published a year before the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress in late 2022, the 82-page document “examines the tools of repression of journalists used by the regime and in particular measures the deterioration of press freedom in Hong Kong”. It also details “Beijing’s strategy to control access to information inside and outside its borders” because, according to the president of the NGO, China “is a regime that disseminates surreptitious propaganda on social networks. These despotic regimes today both censor, prohibit and feed propaganda and disseminate it absolutely everywhere”.
The report notes in particular that journalists are “forced to become spokespersons for the party” because they must follow a 90-hour training course partly focused on “thought of Xi Jinping” and that they are subject to the country’s propaganda. Furthermore, “very few subjects now escape censorship”, ranging from Tibet to #MeToo via the Covid-19 pandemic. “To get a press card, there are tests of knowing the president’s thinking, there is a review of journalists’ footprints on social media, so if you’ve strayed from the line of power a bit, you can just be pushed aside “, details the president of RSF.
But above all, the report recalls that at least 127 journalists are currently in prison in China. “simply because they are doing their job”, explains Christophe Deloire on franceinfo. More than half are Uyghur journalists, members of this discriminated Muslim community in China. “There are extremely heavy sentences. There have even been life sentences handed down against Uyghur journalists, so you can imagine what the reaction of other journalists is when they see this. Necessarily, it arouses terror. which then keeps the media system “, says the president of the NGO.
Reporters Without Borders titled this report “the great leap back in journalism in China” with reference to “that economic policy of Mao which was the ‘great leap forward’ which had been an absolute fiasco leading to famines in the late 1950s”.
“Investigative journalism was starting to test the red lines in China. There had been a development of investigative journalism. Today, it has disappeared at least half if not completely in some places.”
Reporters Without Borders
“There, it is a big leap back because, under President Xi Jinping, compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao, we have clearly started in the opposite direction of what we could consider as the meaning of history , that is to say to move towards greater liberalization “, keep on going Christophe Deloire.
He denounces the “Continued persecution of those who try to disseminate information. One of the most recent examples is that of journalist Zhang Zhan who had made a hundred videos on her YouTube channel at the time of the start of the Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan and was sentenced to four years in prison. The prosecutor accused her of posting a lot of false information but in fact there was no evidence against her. “.