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Alert

Reformist journalists and intellectuals punished and censored

(RSF/IFEX) - RSF has alerted the European delegation to the 8 December 2004 European Union (EU)-China summit in the Netherlands that China has launched a new crackdown on reformists.

In November, the Chinese Communist Party's Propaganda Department blacklisted six renowned political commentators from the state-owned press. The authorities have also curbed coverage on the role of intellectuals in China's development. Journalist Wang Guangze has been sacked under official pressure.

As Prime Minister Wen Jiabao prepares to attends the EU-China summit, a new wave of censorship and repression has been unleashed, said RSF. These sanctions from another age, sidelining liberals from political life, threaten to damage the credibility of reforms instituted by Wen's government, the organisation noted.

RSF pointed out that some 25 Chinese journalists and 62 cyberdissidents are currently imprisoned.

In early November, the Propaganda Department ordered official media outlets to stop publishing articles from the six reformist political commentators. They include Jiao Guobiao, a professor of journalism at Beijing University, who called for the abolishment of the Propaganda Department and for the holding of free elections. Under official pressure, the university cancelled his journalism course in September.

The China Information Centre identified the other five blacklisted commentators as veteran Communist Party member Li Rui, writers and political commentators Wang Yi and Yu Jie, Tianze Economic Research Institute director Mao Yushi and Yao Lifa, a peasants' rights activist in Hubei province, eastern China.

The Propaganda Department has been waging a struggle against reformist intellectuals, banning them from using the state-owned press to publicly raise concerns about the country's poorest citizens and to promote social justice.

On 23 November, Wang Guangze, of the biweekly "Ershiyi shiji jingji baodao" ("The 21st Century Business Herald"), was dismissed upon his return from the United States, where he had attended, with official permission, a seminar on ethics and new technology at Trinity College, in Connecticut. Wang, 32, presented a paper entitled, "The development and possible evolution of political ecology in China in the age of the Internet". Wang's talk focused on how the Internet is currently transforming China's political landscape and civil society, despite official controls.

On his return, the journalist was told he had been dismissed for being "absent" and for "poor quality work" for his newspaper over the previous two months. "Ershiyi shiji jingji baodao" is published by the Nanfang Daily press group.

Wang was quoted by the Hong Kong daily "South China Morning Post" as saying he had been promised a promotion before he left for the United States. "The authorities have learned new, more sophisticated and very effective techniques to control the press," he added.

Wang was previously unemployed for four years of after being dismissed from the "Legal Daily" in 1999 for defending the wife of a pro-democracy dissident.