Section 14

Stuff reported this morning that a signing ceremony at Parliament was postponed last night because Chinese vice-premier Zeng Peiyan objected to one of the journalists present.

Despite being an accredited press gallery journalist, Nick Wang was escorted to the Speaker’s office by a police officer while the signing ceremony took place.

Prime Minister Helen Clark claims that Wang and his cameraman were excluded not because of pressure from China but because of “a misunderstanding”. She doesn’t say what sort of a misunderstanding it was - perhaps Wang understood that we have freedom of the press in New Zealand - but goes on to say that she is “not entirely certain of the circumstances”, a neat trick whereby she can never be wrong.

Apart from his distaste for free trade, Greens co-leader Russel Norman gets it right:

It is simply wrong for the Labour Government to direct police to remove a press gallery accredited journalist from a media event inside our own government building because the Deputy Premier of China doesn’t like the journalist.

By excluding Nick Wang, a press gallery accredited journalist from the Capital Chinese News newspaper, the Government is sacrificing free speech in a sad and desperate attempt to win favour with the Chinese so that they will sign a trade deal with New Zealand.

The Government must tell the Chinese Government that when they come to New Zealand they will be exposed to dissenting views because we value freedom of speech, trade deal or no trade deal.

I’m all for a free trade agreement with China but along with the clothing and electronics we must not import their political repression.

Hat tip: Kiwiblog.

There have been a few stories about China on this blog - China and Google, China and Microsoft, Falun Gong - and it seems that they’ve noticed. China’s internet censoring technology, dubbed the Great Firewall of China, now blocks this site. You can test your own site at a “great firewall” test site. Are you as dangerous as a mongol horde?

Hat tip: Pacific Empire.

The Greens reported on Friday that Falun Gong had been kicked out of the Cuba Carnival and Chinese New Year celebrations in Wellington.

[Green Party Wellington City spokesperson Iona] Pannett said “this issue once again raises serious questions about the Council’s commitment to freedom of speech in the city. This decision infringes on Falun Gong’s right to free speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and to any other group or individual who wants to speak on issues that the Council does not agree with.”

Greens co-leader Russel Norman, writing on FrogBlog, says

The word is that the Council told them that the Chinese Embassy had paid for the big Chinese New Year celebration and the Chinese Embassy did not want Falun Gong in the parade, so they had to go.

“The word” presumably comes from Falun Gong. Wellington City Council would deny any connection.

Norman rightly continues:

If the story is accurate then the City Council is bending to the will of a foreign government to suppress freedom of expression in return for money.

Regular Section 14 readers will remember that Falun Gong were also excluded from Wellington’s Christmas parade.

One of the biggest upsides of globalisation is that as well as Coca-Cola and Versace, people in dictatorships like China also get a taste for other Western goods like freedom of expression. It would be a travesty if the reverse were to occur and we imported this dictatorship’s repressive policies into New Zealand.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has admitted that bowing to Chinese requests to censor search results was a mistake.

Google, whose motto is famously “Don’t be evil”, colluded with the Chinese Government in their construction of “The Great Firewall of China” by filtering Google’s search results to remove references to topics such as Falun Gong and the Tianenmen Square massacre.

Brin, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said that he regretted the decision to censor because the company’s reputation had suffered in America and Europe.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch notes,

I’m glad that these remarks were made somewhat informally and without massaging from Google PR. It is a rare glimpse into the heart of an organization struggling with coming to terms with its own power, still only a few years old. But if Google wants to stay in the good graces of the smug western crowds, they need to say they regret working with the Chinese government because that government is evil, not because it turned out to be “a net negative” business decision.

China has lifted a series of restrictions on the media in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. As part of its bid the Chinese government promised the International Olympic Committee that it would allow free reporting before and during the Games. The reporting restrictions have been suspended for the period 1 January 2007 to 17 October 2008.

Currently reporters are not allowed to travel freely and are not allowed to interview people without official permission. Those rules are now gone. The biggest concern is how the rules are enforced, given China’s secretive official culture. Christian Science Monitor reports

The strength of that culture is clearly evident in an official police language-training manual obtained by the Monitor. It is being used to teach Beijing policemen the English phrases they might need when dealing with Olympic visitors.

Published by China’s Public Security Bureau University and the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, “Olympic Security English” contains a practice dialog entitled, “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage”.

The dialog teaches policemen the English phrases they would need to detain a foreign reporter found talking to a Chinese citizen about Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual movement.

Beijing city patrolmen are given the manual as part of a home study program according to one city police officer who asked not to be identified. They are taught how to say, “You’re a sports reporter. You should only cover the Games,” and to tell the reporter that Falun Gong is “beyond the permit” and “beyond the limit of your coverage and illegal.”

How effective these changes are remains to be seen but let’s hope that under the world’s gaze Chinese society is prized a little more open and that with the genie out of the bottle that openness lasts long after the closing ceremony.

Auckland City Council has joined Wellington in kicking Falun Gong out of their Santa Parade. Last week, this site reported (Importing Chinese Repression?) that Wellington City Council had excluded the Falun Gong float from the Christmas parade because it was being ’streamlined’. This week, Falun Gong reports (Falun Gong discriminated against in New Zealand) that the same thing has happened in Auckland.

Their 2006 application was initially welcomed as Parade organisers said a 60-piece brass band would be a great addition to the parade. There was also an offer of $250 to help band members as they are all volunteers.

When organisers were subsequently told the band members comprised Falun Gong members, the application was withdrawn on the grounds that the “organization does not ‘fit’ with the Santa Parade,” and would not, “turn children’s fantasies into reality, to delight families staging an annual fantasy Santa Parade to herald the start of the festive season in Auckland.”

As I said in my post on the Wellington decision:

The biggest concern is that city officials have been pressured (either explicitly or implicitly) by China to exclude Falun Gong from council-sponsored events. As a public entity, the city council must ensure that it doesn’t use its sponsorship of cultural events as a way to censor political or religious expression.

I asked Wellington City last week about concerns that they were keeping Falun Gong out of the parade because of pressure from China. I asked for assurance that we weren’t importing Chinese repression into New Zealand. I haven’t had a reply.

Auckland City has a sister city relationship with Guangzhou in China. Presumably Auckland councillors are also willing to censor religious expression to protect their ratepayer funded holidays.

The Dominion Post reports today (p A5) that Wellington City Council has kicked the Falun Gong out of this year’s Christmas Parade. In previous years the religious group has taken part in the parade and won awards for their float featuring Chinese drummers and dancers.

Falun Gong spokesman Chris Thomas said he had tried to register the group in the Wellington Christmas parade but was told by organisers that, as the parade was being “streamlined”, they would not be included.

“When we asked what we could do to make the parade criteria, we were only told that we were not going to be in it. We feel that was an inadequate answer.”

The biggest concern is that city officials have been pressured (either explicitly or implicitly) by China to exclude Falun Gong from council-sponsored events. As a public entity, the city council must ensure that it doesn’t use its sponsorship of cultural events as a way to censor political or religious expression.

Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast is currently in China on a sister-city jolly and presumably doesn’t want to put the free trips at risk. Others on the trip have said they have no intention of bringing up human rights questions because things aren’t perfect here. This is a disgraceful moral equivalence. In New Zealand when the ruling socialist elite want to vilify a dissident religious group they call them “chinless scarf-wearers” - they don’t shoot them and then cut out their internal organs.

One of the biggest upsides of globalisation is that as well as Coca-Cola and Versace, people in dictatorships also get a taste for other Western goods like freedom of expression. It would be a travesty if the reverse were to occur and we imported this dictatorship’s repressive policies into New Zealand.

UPDATE 22/11/06: Wellington City Council has replied to my enquiry:

(more…)

The BBC has reported (Hat tip: Boing Boing) Microsoft’s senior policy counsel Fred Tipson as saying that Microsoft might have to consider pulling out of repressive countries like China.

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

Google was recently criticised because they were seen to be helping the Chinese government censor search results. (Compare the searches for “Tiananmen Square massacre” on google.co.nz and google.cn.) Google argued that having any presence in China was better than having none if freedom of information was the goal. Critics suggested that helping China censor the web didn’t sit very well with Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto.

Microsoft may be responding to criticism from Amnesty International, which last week highlighted the circumstances of several jailed bloggers (Hat tip: NZ Herald). Along with Yahoo, Microsoft has been attacked for shutting down blogs run by people the Chinese government wants silenced.

The Internet has tremendous potential to bring information from the outside world to people living under repressive regimes and it’s very encouraging to see companies with muscle, like Microsoft, using their position to encourage change in places like China. Meanwhile, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft need to decide how much persecution makes it unacceptable to do business there. Is the goal of free speech in China better served by providing a censored service, in the hopes that people demand more of their own government, or by refusing to provide any service at all?