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Chinese media censorship
steps up as news editors sacked
Three news editors at a southern Chinese television station
have been axed after unwittingly broadcasting a scene from
the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, officials said last Friday.
Lin Shufu, director of the news department of the Zhuhai television
station in Guangdong province was sacked along with editors
Zhang Yuancong and Chen Yixue for broadcasting 1.8 seconds
of footage showing a picture of the student democracy uprising.
According to a spokesman from the general office of Zhuhai
television station, the footage was shown on July 9 and was
part of a news story on the opening of the Macau Cable Television
Station. The Tiananmen scene was shown amid a background display
of other photos. The Chinese government considers the 1989
Tiananmen democracy protests a taboo subject.
The protests were crushed by the Chinese military in Front
of a worldwide television audience on June 4, 1989, leaving
hundreds, and possibly thousands, of protesters dead. Macau,
which borders Zhuhai, is the former Portuguese colony handed
over to China last year and is administered under the "one
country, two systems" doctrine which allows greater press
freedom than the mainland.
Nan Shaoming, Zhuhai Television’s vice director in charge
of news was also awaiting "internal punishment,"
the Zhuhai television spokesman said. The Hong Kong-based
Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said the
sackings were further evidence that China’s propaganda
bureau "is greatly strengthening the degree of control
over news nationwide."
The fleeting Tiananmen image was spotted by the Guangdong
provincial branch of the propaganda bureau, which immediately
ordered action to be taken, the center said. The sackings
come after a popular call-in radio program of the Guangdong
People’s Broadcasting Station was sanctioned for allowing
a caller to blast rampant corruption in the ruling Communist
Party and government on July 27. According to the Zhuhai station
spokesman, who declined to be named, the news editors were
unaware the Tiananmen picture was in the background of their
footage.
Although the three news editors were sacked from their jobs,
they would continue to be employed by the television station
under a different, but yet undetermined, capacity, he said.
"Their punishment has already been serious, they only
made a work mistake, objectively there was no seriously bad
influence to the society," he said. The propaganda bureau
is a central Communist Party organ which administers and censors
the government-run state media, while advancing state political
ideology.
In recent months, leading propaganda officials have published
speeches and reports calling for a crackdown on "western
bourgeois" ideas or media practices in the media, while
overseeing the expulsion of liberal intellectuals in leading
state institutes like the China Academy of Sciences. The crackdown
comes as the party seeks to establish the ideological theories
of President Jiang Zemin, the "core" of the third
generation party leadership following the late Mao Zedong
and Deng Xiaoping, ahead of next year’s 80th anniversary
of the Communist Party.
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