On March 29, CMP director Qian Gang attended the Annual Kam Yiu-yu Press Freedom Awards in Hong Kong and gave the following address on the struggle for freedom of speech in China since the 1989 June 4th Incident. The Kam Yiu-yu Press Freedom Awards are named in honour of former Wen Wei Po editor-in-chief Kam Yiu-yu (金尧如).
After martial law was declared in China in May 1989, Kam and other top editors at the CCP-aligned Hong Kong paper made the decision to leave a blank space, or tian chuang (天窗), in place of their lead editorial as an expression of protest.
The text in the blank space read simply: “Bitter and hateful lamentations!”

My friends:
It’s already been twenty-five years since the June 4th Incident of 1989. At that time I was a reporter at the Liberation Army Daily in Beijing, and I became embroiled in events that spring.
In April, the editor-in-chief of Shanghai’s World Economic Herald, Qin Benli, faced dismissal from his post because the paper had dared to run an article mourning the death of Hu Yaobang. As a personal decision, I sent a telegram to Qin voicing my support:

The full honor of history is yours, Qin Benli, pioneer of freedom of speech in China.

That May the students began their hunger strikes, and I went with a friend to Tiananmen Square to visit with them. Because of these two things, I was stripped of my post and removed from the army in the purges that came after.
Working in Beijing at the time, I already knew the editor-in-chief of Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po, Lee Tze Chung, and Ching Cheong and Lau Yui-siu and I were already friends. The image of Yui-siu driving this old truck and speeding all over Beijing to interview students is burned deep into my memory. I had urged my own team of PLA Daily reporters to study Yiu-sui’s example as a model of professional journalism.
It’s been 25 years. Since the June 4th Incident, China’s journalists have spent another quarter century on the arduous road to freedom of speech.
My hosts have invited me to talk about the road we’ve traveled over the past 25 years. That’s not an easy ask, because there have been so many frustrations — and yet, so many changes too. Indulge me for just ten minutes as I make a simple sketch of this period in history.
We can see today that there have been five actors, or factors, that have been closely connected to the struggle for freedom of speech. These are: political power, the news media, the market economy, information technology and civil society. More concisely, let’s call them: power, media, market, technology and citizens. On the question of freedom of speech, these five things have interacted, counteracted and struggled.
In the Deng Xiaoping era there were only two of these factors at work, power and media. In the Jiang Zemin era there were three — power, media and market. And in the Hu Jintao era, technology and citizens were added to the equation.
In the Mao Zedong era before economic reforms, power devoured the media. All of the newspapers were the same, a single voice, and the media were merely tools of despotism. After economic reforms there was a return to some sense of professionalism and notions of autonomy. In the midst of the political reform wave that came in the 1980s there was a corresponding push for press reform.
Media at that time were all Party media. Media were controlled by power, but they sought a level of their own autonomy. Media were often forced by power to utter falsehoods, but they strove to speak truths. This was the game and the struggle that marked the times.
In the spring of 1989, as the pro-democracy movement gathered force, some journalists shouted openly for freedom of speech. There was still no market economy in China at the time, and while experiments in market-oriented media had begun — such as the Economic Weekly in Beijing — these were just delicate green shoots. Some commercial media had begun to appear, like the small tabloids sold at street side, but we were far from having anything resembling a media market.
The market economy in China was something Deng Xiaoping gave his final bursts of energy and influence to achieve. the period immediately following Deng’s “southern tour” was a brief honeymoon period for the media. Those who coveted freedom of speech sprang into action. That period brought the rise of such media as Southern Weekly and Caijing magazine. The two-dimensional structure of power and media became a three-dimensional structure of power-media-market. In his essay, “Democratic Reform Media in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan” (中港台传媒与民主改革的交光互影), Chin-chuan Lee analysed “liberalisation and political control” in detail.
In fact, Jiang Zemin’s phrase “be silent and make a fortune” (闷声发大财) could also be applied to the press policy of the Chinese Communist Party. During that period political power’s relationships and alliances with media and market were equivocal. Of course the Party wanted the media to behave, but it also wanted media to generate profits for them.
In the Jiang Zemin era, crony capitalism developed at a fierce pace. Those who sought freedom of speech used the weapon of marketisation to resist political power, and they discovered that power and the market were often locked in an embrace. Power required the market, the market regarded power with dread, and at times capital was willing to heed power or even work hand-in-hand to control and suppress the media.
But it was in the Jiang Zemin era that a new phantom emerged on the scene, and that was the internet. We can thank our lucky stars that Jiang Zemin did not recognise at the time that the internet would come to haunt China’s leaders. He was supportive of the internet at the time — even though he did not, like Mahatir in Malaysia, announce that there would be no attempt to censor the internet. Of course, it wasn’t until the Hu Jintao era that the internet really began to make its strength felt.
When Hu Jintao came to power in the fall of 2002 the internet was already a lively space, the main platforms being commercial internet news portals, chat rooms and comment sections accompanying news articles. About midway through Hu Juntao’s first term (2002-2007) blogs came on the scene and there was talk about the potential impact of “citizen journalists.”
Many sudden-breaking stories were reported first on the internet by citizens on the ground (internet portals were not permitted to have their own news teams). Corrupt officials we’re often exposed through internet “human flesh searches,” or renrou sousuo (人肉搜索). The internet became a boisterous and diverse space where various opinions could be amplified.
Around the middle of Hu Jintao’s second term (2007-2012) microblogging services emerged on the scene. And at the tail end of his time in office, WeChat came on the scene. More and more people in China were now using the mobile internet — smartphones and tablets. In the past, publishing newspapers, producing radio and television programming, all required high costs. Now the threshold for news production was being pushed lower and lower. The age of “me media” had arrived. Sharing images and video was now easier than ever. This was a subversion and a challenge. It was a challenge to political power and a challenge to capital. The ultimate beneficiaries of information technology were the citizenry.
Over the ten years of Hu Jintao’s rule, civil society developed steadily. This was not thanks to the leadership, of course, but came only through constant struggle by citizens against constant barriers. The interface between civil movements and new media was like a storm cloud moving in, changing the weather in unforeseen ways.
We can already see the changes brought about by this five-dimensional structure of power-media-market-technology-citizen.
Information technology has shaken traditional media such as newspapers and magazines. At the same time, it has created countless new media. In the media marketplace, the internet already reigns supreme. Among internet companies, the big players are the companies listed overseas — the like of Sina and Tencent. In terms of their financial structures, these media are entirely different from Party and government media. The intimate relationship between information technology and the nedia marketplace has already become a major force that cannot be underestimated.
For the traditional media, these are tough times. On the one hand they face strict controls from the press censorship system, and on the other they face stiff and unrelenting competition from new media. Still, there are plenty of journalists of conscience still working in the traditional media. Meanwhile, many professional journalists have migrated from newspapers and magazines to new opportunities to push the bounds and struggle for freedom.
We can expect citizens and civil society to become catalysts for further change. In fighting for their own interests, and for justice and fairness, citizens must struggle also for openness of information and freedom from guilt by expression. Freedom of speech is not just about the rights of the media. It is about the basic rights of all citizens. Many of the people now leading civic organisations and social movements are also major personalities online.
It goes without saying that on the internet at least half of what you see isn’t real. The terrain is chaotic. In our coarse age of sunken values, it’s not a surprise to find unscrupulous media and unscrupulous reporters.
The best balancing factor against poor professional conduct by the media is civil society. Civil society has the potential to demand media act responsibly as they pursue the truth. In fact, more and more journalists in China have become involved in the process of civil society development. Standing together with citizens who seek freedom of expression, experienced journalists who know the terrain well have used the internet to challenge barriers in news coverage. Sometimes they have made advances, and sometimes they have been ruthlessly checked.
The officials in China charged with controlling public opinion are distinctly aware of the challenges they face. In the past 25 years since the June 4th Incident, the market, technology and citizens have compelled political power to change the old system of controls. So far as they are concerned, the most urgent task before them is to turn the immense resources of state capitalism toward the task of both utilising and controlling the media market and information technology, and suppressing civil society. Their hope is to use the market and technologies to advance the Party’s own goals, to strengthen the influence of the Party’s own publications, website and media groups. They reserve the right to purge any voice online, at any time, that they regard as “static” or “noise.” During the second half of 2013, as Xi Jinping spoke, in hardline echoes of the past, of a “public opinion struggle,” the internet entered a period of deepfreeze. Weibo suffered a blow from which it has yet to recover.
Where is the road ahead for freedom of speech? I think, rather than answer this question with talk of optimism or pessimism, of hope or despair, we should answer it with action. We should engage ourselves in those deep changes that are happening right now. These changes could come in many shapes and sizes. They might be changes impelled by social pressure. They might be the product of strife within the political ranks. Or they might be changes actively pursued by those in power (what we called “political system reforms”).
The most decisive changes are likely to come from the market, from technology and from civic action. 2014 is not 1989. Just imagine, if we had the internet at that time, if there had been Twitter and Facebook, Weibo and WeChat, if mature civic organisations like those we have now had existed — would things have happened differently? We doesn’t yield to conjecture. But the future, that is something we can make ourselves.
Over the past 25 years, the road toward freedom of speech has been rough and winding. To be frank about it, we’ve not progressed very far these twenty-five years. But I’ve seen so many journalists, and so many online writers, who have struggled on even as their blogs are “harmonised,” as they’ve suffered abuse or even been detained. They have never given up the fight. They continue to voice their belief in freedom through their actions.
So perhaps the most important question we can ask about achieving freedom of speech, about truly realising the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press as guaranteed in Article 35 of China’s Constitution, is: what can we do today?
Thank you, everyone!

Read the news about the news in China today and you might note the sober and severe tone. The official Xinhua News Agency reports that nine government departments have jointly launched a concerted campaign to “crack down on news extortion and fake news.” [Click here for a past CMP example of “fake news”].
The notice, we are told, refers to these practices as “journalism diseases (新闻界病害) that seriously damage the image of the press corps and erode the authority and credibility of the news media.”

Last week we posted a piece by pseudonymous veteran reporter Shi Yige (施一戈) in which he spoke in quite pessimistic terms about the decline of commercial newspapers and magazines in China as drivers of public opinion. According to Shi, these media enjoyed their “golden era” from 1995 to 2005. Since that time, however, they have been brought to heel by tighter propaganda controls — even as internet-based media have eroded their business models.
But against this rather grim picture, it is worth noting that we can still find plenty of examples of how journalism is alive and kicking at these “metro media” (都市类媒体).
On Weibo and WeChat, users are chattering today about a front-page report in yesterday’s edition of Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, a commercial newspaper published by the Wenhui Xinmin United Press Group [Here on our Media Map].
The report, “Pingdu Brews Tragedy with Rapid Push for Urbanization” (平度强力推进城镇化酿惨剧), takes an in-depth look at conflicts over land and urban development in a community on the northern outskirts of the city of Qingdao. The report, which occupies the first three pages of the March 23 Oriental Morning Post, comes at a time when China’s leadership has focused on urbanization as a primary driver of future economic growth.
Sina Weibo user “Newspaper Observer” (@报纸观察) wrote of the report today: “The huge, three-page report in yesterday’s edition of Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post takes a broad and deep look at the tragedies caused already in Pingdu, in Qingdao, by the pushing of urbanization. We salute media who tell the truth!”

Many users on social media also noted that page three of the report mentions the case of Caixin reporter Chen Baocheng (陈宝成), who was detained last year by police in Pingdu while reporting on land disputes there. (The August 12, 2013, statement from Caixin is here).
The passage on page three that mentions Chen Baocheng reads simply: “According to a villager [who identified himself as] Mr. Li, on August 9 last year, before 84 mu of land was listed for auction — on the same night, in fact, that rights defense journalist Chen Baocheng was arrested — 138 mu of crop and orchard land was destroyed with diggers.”
Just to give readers a general flavor of the Oriental Morning Post report, a (very) partial translation follows:

Pingdu Brews Tragedy with Rapid Push for Urbanization
Li Yunfang (李云芳)
Oriental Morning Post
“One dead and three injured, but what really happened that night? If the fire was set deliberately, who was responsible? . . . ”
Yesterday, the official Weibo account of the People’s Daily issued a post . . . demanding that open responses be made, and full and accurate explanations given, so that ironclad facts can convince those who still have lingering doubts, so that the public can see justice done.
On March 21 at around 1:50AM, a fire broke out in a tent erected in a field in Dujiatuan Village, in the Fengtai sub-district of Pingdu City in Shandong Province. [The incident] resulted in the death of one farmer and injuries of varying extent to three others. According to a preliminary investigation by local police, arson is suspected.
A Xinhua News Agency reporter confirmed yesterday that there have been tensions in Dujiatuan Village over land seizure issues since last year. According to villagers, there have been illegal land seizures at Dujiatuan, and about 200 mu of land has been taken by developers, for which villagers received only crop compensation of about 25,000 yuan per mu. But according to regulations, land requisition compensation should include land compensation and resettlement assistance in addition to compensation for crops and other property on the land.
Because they were unhappy with the compensation, beginning on March 9 this year, the villagers erected a tent at the entrance to a local building worksite, arranging for people to stand guard there 24 hours a day in order to prevent the continuation of work. They demanded adequate compensation in accordance with the law.
After the fire, local media quoted villagers as saying that on the night it happened four villagers responsible for looking after the land were inside the tent, which was then doused with fuel on all four sides and ignited. Ultimately, three of the people got out of the tent with varying injuries, but unfortunately 63 year-old villager Geng Fulin moved to slowly and died.
Right now, there are many different theories about the cause of the fire. According to the official Weibo of the Pingdu City Propaganda Department, “Pingdu Release” (平度发布), the injured were all villagers from Dujiatuan who objected to the distribution of land proceeds by the village committee.
On his Weibo account, the scholar Yu Jianrong shared the words of someone claiming to be the project’s “general contractor”: “The village cadres used the compensation funds to invest in commercial projects for the village committee. The villagers objected to this. They sought out the village chief and and the government, but this did no good, so they came directly to the worksite to stick a wrench in the gears, forcing us workers to stop work.” This so-called “general contractor” also voiced his own doubts that this was arson.
In Yu Jianrong’s view, the taking of villager’s land in the name of urbanization has already caused many bloody episodes [in China]. “Concerning whether or not this was arson, and who was responsible, the police need to do a thorough investigation. But we also need to be clear about why the villagers were defending the land in the first place.”

In China today there are three principal spheres of public opinion: schools, commercialised media and the internet.
In the 1980s schools were a place of intellectual ferment. But following the events of June 4, 1989, schools were unable to recover their former role as centres of thought and expression. More recently, controls on university faculty and instructors have been draconian, applied in two ways. First, there are strict controls on the hiring of qualified teachers, so that those with more independent views find it difficult to enter universities. Second, instructors with contrarian or more active ideas are seen as “dangerous” and actively suppressed — or are otherwise marginalised, as was Xiao Xuehui (肖雪慧) of Southwest University of Nationalities.
In some cases, instructors are directly removed, as were Xia Yeliang (夏業良) of Peking University, Zhang Xuezhong (張雪忠) of Eastern China University of Politics and Law, and Chen Hongguo (諶洪果) of Northwest University of Politics and Law.
Third, controls have been tightened on younger instructors, with assessments, for example, that demand credentials on politics and ideology.
Fourth, resources for projects and topics are utilised in order to purchase allegiance, so that scholars everywhere are lining up to be complicit.
The first three of these methods form the stick and the last is the carrot.
Where students are concerned, they employ a coordinated set of stability preservation techniques, strictly controlling their speech, associations and gatherings. To this is added the pressures of testing, assessment and career placement, so that students find it almost impossible to create a sphere of free and uninhibited speech.
In sum, China’s universities are ponds of dead water, and they present no real challenge to authorities.
By commercialised media I mean principally metro newspapers and news magazines. Most representative are those of the Nanfang newspaper group, and also Caijing magazine and Caixin Media.
Commercialised media in China had their so-called golden decade from 1995 to 2005. During this period Chinese glimpsed for the first time what market-oriented media and news reports looked like. Media professionals and the news itself underwent rapid change.

During this decade public opinion was largely in the hands of these commercialised media, aided by the force of the internet. They had real power to set agendas, as we saw in the Sun Zhigang case and SARS in 2003.
Unfortunately, commercialised media always had a ceiling in the form of a whole system of news controls. What’s more, the focus of many market-oriented media was on entertainment over public affairs reporting.
As the internet grew into a dominating force, commercialised media faced pressure from two sides — from worsening press controls on the one hand, and from fast, expansive and in relative terms freer web-based platforms on the other. Before they had time to go into full flower commercial newspapers and magazines were in decline.
The third public opinion sphere, the internet, has developed in four major phases — web forums emerging after the year 2000, blogs emerging after 2005, Weibo emerging after 2009, and WeChat emerging after 2012. In the early phase of each stage of web development, Chinese authorities lacked the experience they needed to apply control, and this meant relative space for expression. This was especially true in the early days of Weibo, which all at once created the fantasy that “the surrounding gaze can change China.”
The golden era of Weibo lasted a short two years from 2009 to 2011. During this time it was possible to see just about any public affairs topic imaginable. Major milestones included the Wenzhou railway crash and the death of Qian Yunhui. As discussion heated up on Weibo, it turned increasingly to issues such as “universal values” (constitutionalism, democracy), which became an emerging social consensus.

After Xi Jinping came to power, he began comprehensively reigning in all spheres of public opinion. First came the single-chop campaign against universal values with the so-called “Seven Don’t Speaks” (七不讲). Then came a series of combination punches.
The Southern Weekly incident in January 2013 became justification for an official culling of the media. Southern Weekly became cannon fodder, an old warrior of liberal ideas brought to its knees. Not only has the paper now lost many of its finest journalists, but its reputation as a liberal stalwart has suffered and many intellectuals have abandoned it.
Of course, traditional media present little difficulty to the authorities. They can be brought to heel with tried-and-true methods of media control — through the dictates of the propaganda department and the application of pressure at the management level. Newspapers and magazines are no longer the focus of public opinion control.
We are now also seeing a reassertion of control at universities in China. For example, the recent remarks by Yuan Guiren (袁貴仁), China’s minister of education, about the need to “comprehensively hold [strategic] public opinion positions” through stronger internet controls, emphasising also that school leaders needed “to hold themselves to the strictest standards as socialist politicians and educators.”
And right on the heels of Yuan’s piece in the official People’s Daily came the release of a Party document on the strengthening of ideological and political work among young faculty and other teaching staff.
Much of this noise at China’s universities is just that, a puff of posturing that becomes little more than a bureaucratic exercise. But the more important point is that campuses are not the strategic focus, not the root cause of official anxieties over public opinion control. So far, we can say, attempts to control ideas at China’s universities have been largely successful.
The internet remains the most crucial battleground of public opinion.
Lu Wei (鲁炜), the director of China’s State Internet Information Office and a deputy director of the State Council Information Office, has pursued a policy we can characterise as killing the ringleaders to tame the bandits. He has gone after the so-called “Big V” account holders on Sina Weibo, those users — often well-known scholars, lawyers, journalists or businesspeople — who have a huge following and can influence how stories break. These users have had their accounts removed or their posts censored. Some have been “invited to tea,” a euphemism for those involuntary sit-downs with state security thugs. In some cases, users have been detained.
This increased pressure on internet activity has been supported with judicial interpretations, such as one establishing criminal charges of disturbing public order for cases where “rumours” are passed on 500 times or more on social media.
The overall objective of the Chinese authorities, it seems, is to neutralize those pivotal points in the network that can galvanise debate. The concrete means of achieving this is the strategic targeting of “Big V” accounts combined with a more general culling of opinion within the broader base of users. A round of crackdowns in 2013 had an appreciable affect on “Big V” accounts, with the pall of fear substantially toning down discussion. Many historically active users backed off, censoring themselves. The overall chilling effect was obvious to all.
In fact, the rise of WeChat is not necessarily bad news for the leadership. WeChat is a semi-closed platform, and it cannot drive public debate so easily as Weibo. The only means to a more public identity on WeChat is registration of a public account, but control is exercised actively on these accounts — crossing the line results in immediate account deletion. The public account registered by well-known journalist Shi Feike was deleted after just a few weeks.
The most recent round of widespread WeChat account deletions makes clear that the authorities are as resolute about WeChat control as they have been about Weibo. In fact, these most recent WeChat account deletions correspond with the newly-created Internet Security Group. Once Xi Jinping became head of the group, State Internet Information Office director Lu Wei was keen to hold up a few examples. More importantly, though, this tells us that the authorities will not tolerate any threat, latent or otherwise, or any unwanted public opinion that has the potential to expand.
But while internet controls might avail the leadership in the short term, they cannot work in the longer term. Ultimately, the desire to control the thoughts of the people, to restrict speech and debate, is like trapping the moon in a well or pursuing the sun over the horizon (or nailing Jell-O to the wall?). Under the broader trends of globalisation, information growth, marketisation and democratisation, the ideas of the public will continue to mature — and when these ideas intersect with real interest conflicts, there is the potential for a mass movement of resistance.
Public opinion controls cannot resolve structural conflicts. For the moment, all of the structural problems in China are glossed over with GDP growth, with breakneck development. As soon as the economy stalls, the government will have to take responsibility for the mess that lies behind. And the methods at its disposal are already diminishing. Over the past twenty years, China’s human rights dividend has been spent, and the land financing model of the past 10 years has reached a dead end.
I think dramatic social conflict is unlikely to happen within the next five years. While the authorities have few methods at their disposal, they do have sufficient means for suppressing dissent — deep pockets, guns and soldiers. For a short time, perhaps, they can continue to draw on their resources to perpetuate the regime of stability preservation.
But as Xi begins the second half of his term in 2017, the economic contradictions will be even more pronounced, and the resources of stability preservation will be nearly exhausted. When you add to this the internal Party struggles that are likely to come to the fore, it is very possible that China will enter a period of extreme instability.

I was in Yangon on March 9 to hear an address by Burmese opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi to an international media conference called “Challenges of a Free Press,” hosted by the East-West Center. In tackling the issue of freedom of speech, she spoke at length about the media’s “responsibility.”

[Without a free press] . . . we will not be able to defend the rights and freedoms of the people. But at the same time, this press has to be aware not just of its great power and influence, but of the great responsibility that it bears for the building of a new nation that is centered on the will of the people.

Some of the participants shook their heads in disappointment at these remarks, suggesting an emphasis on responsibility was inopportune, and sounded too much like official-ese.