China's investment in high-tech Internet surveillance technology is well known, and the byzantine rules of its Central Propaganda Department have inspired books and academic treatises.
But among the many tools in the box for media control, there's one that's very simple and low-tech: Keep journalists away.
For the first time in more than a decade, China is not the world's worst jailer of the press in CPJ's annual census of imprisoned journalists. Among the 27 jailed in China, one group has seen a massive jump in imprisonments. In another first since CPJ began taking its census, more than half of those behind bars for reporting in China are ethnic Uighur or Tibetan. What's more, two Uighur journalists have been unaccounted for since their scheduled 2011 release. The lack of information available about these cases is added proof that they were arrested to deprive their communities of a voice.
New York, October 31, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the imprisonment of two Tibetan writers, one of whom was sentenced after a year of detention without trial, according to reports.
New York, July 6, 2011--The closed-door sentencing of a Tibetan magazine editor jailed without charge for over a year is another disturbing indicator of the lack of due process allowed to ethnic minority journalists in China, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Relying heavily on vague antistate charges, authorities jail 145 journalists worldwide. Eritrea, Burma, and Uzbekistan are also among the worst jailers of the press. A CPJ special report
New York, January 7, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Xining provincial court in Qinghai province to allow imprisoned Tibetan documentary filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen to appeal a six-year prison sentence he was given last week.
On the same day that historic protests started by monks in Lhasa began and were to sweep all over Tibet in the subsequent months, Dhondup Wangchen was nearly 3,000 kilometers away in Xian, in China’s Shaanxi province. It was the last day of filming for his documentary film project that sought to give voice to Tibetans in the run-up to the Olympic Games. As was the case throughout China, Xian was caught up in an Olympic fervor. Big red banners were hung all over the city, the Olympic mascots peered from shop windows in unspeakably bright colors. None of this however, seemed to have the slightest connection to Tibet or the discontent of the Tibetan people.
New York, March 31,
2009--The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Public Security
Bureau in
New York, March 18, 2009--Chinese public security officials in northwest Gansu province should release two Tibetan journalists detained in the past month or charge them with an offense, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
