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Questioning voices are fading fast under China oppression

Jailing of journalist Gao Yu underscores lengths the Communist Party takes to quash freedom of expression
Questioning voices are fading fast under China oppression

A policeman stands guard outside the China liaison office next to a placard showing a portrait of Chinese journalist Gao Yu left by demonstrators in Hong Kong last Friday (AFP Photo/Philippe Lopez)

 

Published: April 21, 2015 08:55 AM GMT
Updated: April 20, 2015 10:39 PM GMT

Of the rising number of journalists imprisoned in China, few recent cases highlight the dire state of freedom of expression in this country as that of Gao Yu.

Sentenced to seven years in prison by a Beijing court last Friday, Gao’s case reads like a checklist of violations possible only in the most totalitarian of states.

Perhaps more worrying, it shows how successful the Communist Party has become in encouraging its citizens that they have no right to question or find out how their own government operates.

When Gao first went missing on April 24 last year, there was no word from authorities regarding her whereabouts for two weeks when she suddenly appeared on state broadcaster CCTV confessing to the leak of a “highly confidential” document.

“I believe what I have done touched on legal issues, and has harmed the national interest,” Gao said, her face blurred as it was beamed into hundreds of millions of Chinese homes.

Her legal team has since said she had no idea her words would be used on television. They comments were forced following interrogation sessions that lasted up to 10 hours and her blurred face covered up bruising suffered in detention, defense lawyers said. Police also detained her son and told Gao he might be harmed unless she cooperated.

Gao’s trial was considered inadequate even by Chinese standards. The verdict and sentencing was delayed twice without a specified reason, diplomats and journalists were barred from court, and defense lawyers said they were all but ignored during proceedings, including their complaint that Gao’s confession should not be admissible.

Chinese state media has since repeated the charge that Gao leaked a state secret but there is doubt over whether she did anything of the sort, and a suggestion the party was simply looking for a reason to shut her up.

When Gao met with journalists from Australia’s Fairfax Media two days before she was detained, she reportedly complained of threats from authorities.

She had planned to participate in a demonstration on April 26 last year, the 25-year anniversary of an article by the state-run People’s Daily that described the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 as an “anti-party and anti-socialist upheaval”.

The central allegation that she leaked state secrets is difficult to verify because of the secrecy that has surrounded Gao’s trial, but again there are major holes in the case against her.

She was accused of leaking ‘Document No 9’, a party paper that warns of the threat of Western democracy, freedom of the press and civil society, dated April 22, 2013.

In June or July of the same year, a Communist Party member supposedly photocopied the document, passed it to Gao, who then gave it to Ho Pin, the chief editor of Mingjing, a magazine with offices in Hong Kong and the United States.

Mingjing, which published an article on the document in September 2013, has repeatedly stated that it already had a copy of Document No 9.

Gao herself also posted articles on the document on the Deutsche Welle website, but this was not until early the following year.

If she was responsible for the original leak, there is no word that the party member who gave it to her has been similarly punished and there remains considerable doubt over whether it constitutes a state secret in the first place.

Gao’s lawyers have asked a higher authority, the National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, to determine whether Document No 9 constitutes a state secret at all, and if so, at what level of security.

Document No 9 itself was internally distributed to Communist Party members across the country the month after Xi Jinping started his term as president. It lists Western democracy, universal values, civil society, neo-liberalism, press freedom, reassessment of history and challenging China’s brand of socialism as the main enemies of the new leadership.

“If we allow any of these ideas to spread, they will disturb people’s existing consensus on important issues like which flag to raise, which road to take, which goals to pursue, etc., and this will disrupt our nation’s stable progress on reform and development,” it reads.

In a Monday editorial justifying Gao’s sentencing, the state-run Global Times appeared mystified that the western media was viewing the case in terms of freedom of expression. As has become increasingly typical in China under Xi, the article painted Gao as someone who relied on “Western forces” and broke “the law”.

But on one key point the editorial was certainly right: “Some in the West have repeatedly attacked China on the issues of human rights and freedom of speech. It is clear that China and the West will not see eye to eye on this in the near future. These accusations are in danger of descending into farce, and have little impact on the Chinese people except to create resentment.”

When asked about the Gao case at the weekend, three Chinese in Beijing — including one journalist — said they knew nothing about it.

This is hardly surprising. There was little coverage in the Chinese media except an article that cited the court. In such cases in China, defense lawyers and defendants are never cited, thereby denying any voice counter to the party narrative. Last year, the Supreme Court reported that only seven people in 1,000 are found not guilty in China, a rate that drops lower in political cases.

Although discussion of Gao’s case on social media did take place on Friday, this was almost exclusively repostings of official Chinese news media. It was not possible to determine whether the likes of Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, had removed postings on Gao, as it reportedly does with many sensitive topics.

By today, authorities had apparently decided that discussion of Gao’s case was over. Weibo returned no results for her name, just the message: “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, ‘Gao Yu’ search results are not displayed.”

In reader comments beneath the Global Times editorial, which also heavily filters postings, most were against Gao. Those few that accused the government of violating basic rights were shouted down, accused of being Western spies or China-haters.

This view was replicated in the conversation with the three Chinese at the weekend, which ended with the journalist saying it was okay for Chinese to criticize the government but not suitable for foreigners to do so.

Although it is possible to meet Chinese who disagree, anecdotally the majority of the country’s 1.35-plus billion people seem to take a similar position.

This suggests the party’s efforts to suppress information and take the lead on ideology have been remarkably successful, even in an era during which more than half the population use the Internet.

It has convinced the majority of people that someone leaking the party’s internal policies is a traitor, and has managed to make the vast majority incurious about the cases of such people.

At the same time, the government has successfully hidden from almost all of its citizens the fact that this person was detained secretly, forced to confess, beaten, received threats against their children, was denied proper representation in court and anyone independent bearing witness to their trial.

Perhaps most frightening of all, the government has convinced many it is wrong for someone who is not of the same nationality to raise any of these issues.

The questions raised as a result serve to invert reality and push China in the direction of the absurd, like any classic totalitarian state.

According to this logic, can a Chinese working at a foreign media agency, or a foreigner working for a Chinese, ask these difficult questions? Can Chinese criticize any other country on rights, or indeed anything at all? The list goes on.

For years, many have wondered when China might show the kind of appetite for reform of its political system already shown for the economy more than a generation ago.

Gao’s case shows that China is, if anything, going backwards in this regard under Xi. In 2008, just 24 journalists were behind bars, today the number is 44, according to Reporters Without Borders.

In response to Gao’s sentence, some Western commentators have suggested Beijing be denied the chance to host the 2022 Olympic Games — it is currently on a shortlist of two alongside Almaty, Kazakhstan.

But such a move would simply prompt ordinary Chinese to side with their brutal government, and reinforce the belief that foreigners are working to hurt Chinese interests.

If China is ever going to break free of its climate of silence it surely needs more citizens that are willing to ask difficult questions and receive difficult replies. But such people are in increasingly short supply. The few that do exist in China are typically put behind bars. They end up like Gao.

Dan Long is the pseudonym of a journalist based in Beijing who has reported on the region for more than a decade.

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