CHINA – POLITICS

1. New Rules on Critical News Reporting

   • State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), China’s main state media regulator, has announced new rules that forbid journalists and media organizations from publishing “critical” reports without approval from their Party work unit.
     1. The original Xinhua report
     2. “[SAPPRFT] published the rule in a circular announcing a crackdown on false news and journalists who take bribes or extort money from their sources. It says that the news agencies must crack down on corruption and journalists who break the law must be handed over to judicial authorities. Journalists who violate the rules will be stripped of their license to report. Journalists are also forbidden from setting up their own websites, video sites or writing internal reports with critical content. The regulator did not specify what constituted critical content or what particular subjects journalists cannot criticise. The rules also forbid journalists from conducting interviews or writing reports outside their assigned fields of coverage. News agencies must regularly solicit opinions from « the masses », as well as propaganda authorities and other media regulators, including itself. Media that violated the rules could be stripped of their licenses”

• Reuters reported that officials have denied that the aim is to stifle legitimate criticism. Jiang Jianguo, deputy head of the administration, whom Reuters interviewed, told the official Xinhua news agency that the government was dedicated to protecting reporters’ rights. “Some people misinterpreted our instruction as not allowing press criticism in general, but in fact, we have resolutely protected reporters’ lawful professional rights and positively support media supervision via public opinion,”… The order that reporters get their employers’ approval to conduct critical reporting is « in line with regular regulations and addresses the problem journalists abusing their positions for blackmail »

1. David Bandurski wrote at China Media Project that, while some of the rules’ phrasing was “dangerously ambiguous,” there had been a “degree of alarmism” in foreign media reactions. Rather than a practical shift, he describes the rules as “a warning siren alerting media to the fact that the Party […] is more serious now about exercising what it sees as its right — the control of all channels of information.” “It bears noting, however, that there is little of substance in the June 18 circular on “critical reporting” that we can say unequivocally represents a “tightening” or “worsening” of the situation for journalists in China. Which is not to say — I repeat, NOT to say — that continued attention to the issue of press freedom in China is not crucial (it is), or that there is any doubt we’ve seen a progressive worsening of the situation for professional journalists and internet users alike in China.”
2. Writing under his customary pen name Shan Renping, meanwhile, Global Times editor Hu Xijin called for clearer rules and the protection of journalists’ right to act as “a watchdog of public opinion.”But he drew a distinction between “rightful” media criticism and any Western-flavored negative comment on China’s basic political system: “Now in China, it is impossible to ban all critical voices. But it must be noted that these criticisms, including critical reports, are bound to contribute to the development of Chinese society. They cannot simply follow the trail of many Western media, because their ways won’t always match Chinese society.”

2. Nationwide Investigation Into Foreign NGOs and CASS in China for ties to foreign forces

   • Chinese media began covering a newly launched investigation last week after information about the probe was published on the city government website of Yuncheng, Shanxi Province. Reuters reports on the hushed launch of the probe and the uneasy relationship between foreign NGOs and Beijing: “[…] The national security commission has ordered a “nationwide comprehensive and thorough investigation of overseas NGOs and their activities, to find out the basic situation,” the city government said in the notice. The move is intended to lay the foundation for strengthening and standardizing management as the next step, it said, adding that the campaign begun in May will run until the end of July. The posting was removed after Chinese media, including the website of the influential magazine Caijing, drew attention to the plan.”
   • Earlier this month, the People’s Daily reported on a top anti-graft official’s claim that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) had been “infiltrated” by foreign forces. As SCMP reports, “the CCDI spoke to nine new discipline inspectors at another leading research institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, about their roles and the anti-graft campaign inside that academy. During a session on Xi’s thoughts on party discipline at Cass, Zhang [Yingwei] said the academy had “ideological problems”. These included using academic research as a guide for other purposes; using the internet to promote theories that played into the hands of foreign powers, allowing undue foreign influence in sensitive issues; and “illegal collusion” between Cass experts and foreign interests at sensitive times. The Economist described the CASS’s place within the hierarchy of Party think-tanks, journals and other organs earlier in March.
   • The article was removed from Chinese websites after becoming the subject of a censorship directive, but can still be seen via Google Cache [Chinese]. The second article in the above list of directives recalls the anti-graft official’s earlier warning, and stresses that the CASS, as the “soul” of Party policy-making, cannot afford to “relax its ideological work” (“意识形态工作不能放松”).
     
     

3. Terrorism in Xinjiang

   • Amidst the hard line crackdown on separatism in Xinjiang, three people have been sentenced to death by the Xinjiang Intermediate People’s Court for planning the attack on October 28 near Tiananmen Gate, in which a car plowed into the crowd and killed two people, as well as the three assailants.
   • Following the recent heightened crackdown on extremist forces in Xinjiang, CCTV has aired a 23-minute English-language feature on China’s rising problem with “violent terrorist crimes.” The video contains graphic footage of attacks that occurred during riots in Turpan during June 2013, the October 2013 Tiananmen jeep crash/explosion, the mass stabbings last March at Kunming railway station, and the attack on an Urumqi market last month. Relying on video footage provided by the State Council Information Office and many street-level and expert interviews, CCTV’s report ties recent attacks to the global jihad movement, credits the spread of “violent jihad” to the Internet and mobile phone, and also attributes attacks to and thoroughly describes the East Turkestan Islamic Movement
   • Reuters reports that the State Council Information Office also provided their organization with the surveillance footage, noting that the newly released video footage signals China “step[ping] up its propaganda campaign to counter [the] upsurge in violence.”

CHINA – DIPLOMACY

1. “1 Liu Xiaobo Plaza’ Could Become Chinese Embassy’s Address in Washington

   • Following a call from U.S. lawmakers, the House Appropriations Committee has voted in favor of renaming the street outside of China’s Washington embassy in honor of human rights activist Liu Xiaobo. TIME reported: “[…] The bid for the new Chinese embassy mailing address was tacked on as an amendment to the 2015 State Department spending bill. The road in front of the Chinese embassy is federally owned, giving Congress some latitude in deciding its fate. (The D.C. Council will also consider the resolution.) Fourteen bipartisan Congressmen, led by Virginia Republican Frank Wolf, shepherded the provision, which calls for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to institute the name change. A street sign adorned with Liu’s name is planned. […] The naming of 1 Liu Xiaobo Plaza was spurred on by Dissident Squared, an advocacy project that describes as its mission “to rename streets fronting the embassies of closed societies — Iran, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Syria — for imprisoned or murdered dissidents.” […]”
   • While the bill is expected to receive support from the rest of the House of Representatives, Foreign Policy notes a lack of clarity surrounding its fate in the Senate. The decision also requires approval from the D.C. Council, and the Washington Post reports that Council Chairman Phil Mendelson has introduced a resolution of support, citing precedent of renaming D.C. roads in effort to exert diplomatic pressure.
   • Beijing is not pleased, as expected. Guardian relayed comments from China’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying: “Some people from the United States have used so-called human rights and the Liu Xiaobo case to engage in this meaningless sensationalism… It is nothing more than an attempt to smear China. We think this is purely a farce.”
   • Newly installed U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus delivered a speech in Beijing. While he applauded the countries’ economic ties and mutual commitment to a “new model” of relations, he also mentioned that the governments remain divided on cyberspying and human rights: “In the past year, China has arrested several moderate voices who had peacefully advocated for such basic things as good governance and the rights of ethnic minorities and the rule of law”.
   • New York Times translates mixed netizen reaction: “Online in China, meanwhile, a post on Sina Weibo was getting a lot of “forwards.” It reminded readers that in 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards renamed the street outside the Soviet Embassy in Beijing “Anti-Revisionism Road.”Another post, from a commenter with the online handle “Black America,” complained that the congressional action was an example of “American imperialism.” But, in what appeared to be an illustration of the rights issues members of Congress said they wanted to highlight, the commenter was unable to break through Chinese censorship to write the name “Liu Xiaobo.” Instead, he referred to “Someone Someone Someone. (某某某)”

2. New Chinese Map Stretches to Stress South China Sea Claims

   • Xinhua news tweeted the map on twitter: “First vertical map of China published. Islands in South China Sea better shown than traditional map”
   • New York Times reports: “Chinese claims in the South China Sea have appeared on Chinese maps before, but mostly in the form of an inset. The new map takes a novel approach. It was presented on Monday in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, by Lei Yixun, the chief editor of the publishing house. In representing China’s claims, the map has 10 dashes in the shape of a tongue around the South China Sea. This is one dash more than the map that was drawn up by the Kuomintang government in the 1940s and that is often cited by Chinese officials as a historical basis for the Communist state’s claims. Many people call that earlier map the “nine dashes” or the “cow’s tongue.” The new vertical map, with its 10 dashes, can be seen on the English website of People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece. […] One thing the map does not show is how China is moving sand onto three or four reefs and rocks in the Spratlys in an effort to turn them into full-fledged islands. Foreign officials say China has been doing this since January. The Philippines has already twice filed formal complaints with China over the island construction, and Vietnam and the United States have both denounced it.”
   • China Real Time’s Wayne Ma posted an explanation of the new map’s rationale and some official and unofficial reactions: “[This map] will give the reader a comprehensive and intuitive awareness of China’s entire map,” Xinhua said, citing Lei Yixun, the editor in chief of Hunan Map Press. “Readers won’t ever think again that China’s territory has primary and secondary claims.” “Some map-publishing authorities in some provinces issued a new version of China’s map, and I believe their goal of doing this is to serve the public,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Wednesday at a regular news briefing. “There is no need to over-read their intentions. China’s position on the South China Sea is consistent and clear. There is no change in our position.”
   • Just interesting: How countries and territories are depicted on maps is a sensitive issue that Google has had to grapple with. Currently, Google Maps maintains different versions of its mapping platform to comply with local laws in “around half a dozen” different countries. The Telegraph’s Matthew Sparkes reports: “If you look at Arunachal Pradesh, one of India’s 29 states, from the Indian version of the website you will see the border that its government believes to be correct. View the same region from within China and it appears as “South Tibet” under Chinese control. From within the UK you see both borders marked with a dotted line to indicate that there is a local dispute.”

 TAIWAN – DIPLOMACY

1. China’s director of the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) visited Taiwan

• Last week, the director of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Zhang Zhijun travelled to Taipei to rebuild broken ties after the Sunflower Movement, making him China’s most senior official ever to visit Taiwan. Upon arrival, Zhang was greeted by dozens of protesters including the leaders of the Sunflower Movement Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting at the Novotel Hotel near the Taoyuan Airport where the meeting between Zhang and Chairman of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Wang Yu-chi would be held.
• Meanwhile, based on the Facebook page of Democracy Tautin, members of the group and the Democratic Front Against the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement stayed in Novotel last Tuesday night, preparing to protest against the meeting of Wang and Zhang on the next day. However, on Wednesday morning, Democracy Tautin said that a group of people in black who claimed to be customer service agents of the hotel broke into the rooms, which triggered an argument. Democracy Tautin said that the police did not give any reasons for why they broke into their hotel rooms, and police even claimed that their actions were legal which was a lie to cover up their use of violence.
• Meanwhile, protest leaders Lin Fei-fan, Chen Wei-ting, Huang Kuo-chang and Lin Chi-hua were denied Visa to Hong Kong. They had planned to attend a forum next Monday by the New School for Democracy, a group that promotes political reform in China. They also had wanted to attend a protest march next Tuesday. ​”We suspect that this is deliberate political suppression by the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong government,​” they said in a Facebook posting. Hong Kong immigration representatives said they would not comment specifically on the case.

2. Taiwanese scholar publishes paper “China’s influence on Taiwan’s media”

   1. Taiwan watcher Ben Goren discussed the newly-published Asian Survey article. “…Hsu identifies how a small proportion of those media, specifically in print and cable TV news stations, came to dominate the market and greatly influence public opinion. The success and growing partisanship of these outlets then made them attractive targets for politicians and parties in Taiwan and China who were seeking to shape public opinion in their favour and sway the outcomes of important elections. Hsu focuses on three broad areas to illustrate and flesh out an argument that Taiwan’s media environment is facing political pressure to limit or censor its criticisms of China, pressure produced from a conflict between maintaining editorial freedom and the price extracted by Beijing for Taiwanese seeking investment and sales opportunities in Chinese markets. These cases examine the takeover of the partisan pro-KMT China Times Group by Want Want Group Chairman Tsai Eng-meng, examples of Chinese pressure on Taiwanese media proprietors and the rising frequency of illegal embedded advertising, and finally the controversy surrounding the sale of Next Media, the public backlash and Anti-Media Monopoly Movement which it engendered, and the related protests over the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement’s (CSSTA) provisions for allowing greater Chinese investment in the Taiwanese publishing sector….Analysts of Taiwanese politics will find in this paper much to discuss, including a number of illuminating anecdotes and pieces of primary evidence.”

HONG KONG – POLITICS

1. Big voter turnout in Hong Kong’s unofficial referendum

• More than 780,000 voted as the poll ended yesterday at 10pm. The proposal tabled by the Alliance for True Democracy, a group comprising 26 of the 27 pan-democratic lawmakers, won the referendum. A joint blueprint put forward by Scholarism and the Federation of Students came second with 302,567 votes (38.4 per cent), followed by a People Power’s proposal, which clinched 81,588 votes (10.4 per cent). All three call for the public to be allowed to nominate candidates for the 2017 chief executive election, an idea repeatedly dismissed by Beijing as inconsistent with the Basic Law. About 88 per cent of voters agreed that the Legislative Council should veto any reform proposal put forward by the government if it failed to meet international standards, compared with 7.5 per cent who disagreed.
• How was the vote designed? See here Voters can vote on website, smartphone apps or polling stations on June 22. The mobile application used for voting has become the most popular iPhone app in Hong Kong and the second most-popular for Android-based devices.
• Organizers had said that they hoped for at least 100,000 participants in a poll that has been condemned as “illegal and invalid” by the central government in Beijing. Most votes have been cast online, through a website or by smartphone, but on last Sunday polling centers opened across Hong Kong, and people voted in curtained booths.
• Before the voting started, the online voting system suffered Hong Kong’s largest and most severe cyber-attack. New York Times reports: “Matthew Prince, chief executive and co-founder of the San Francisco-based company CloudFlare, said in an email Friday that the distributed denial-of-service attack (also known as DDoS) on Occupy Central’s voting platform was “one of the largest and most persistent” ever. Mr. Prince said the attackers appeared to have commanded a network of compromised computers around the world to overwhelm the platform with traffic in hopes of disabling it. The owners of the computers exploited in such attacks are usually unaware that they have been compromised.”
• The State Council Information Office has ordered mainland media to find and delete all news related to the 6/22 Hong Kong referendum, thoroughly clean up related comments, and promptly send a work report [on your progress]; forcibly cancel blogs and microblog posts reprinting harmful information; ensure that no information related to the referendum appears online. Guangdong Province is to cut signal on all programs from Hong Kong television stations, especially on June 22.
• An editorial in the official Global Times reflected Beijing’s response to the poll: “The opposition groups and their overseas supporters have overestimated the effect of an illegal farce. Neither China’s central government nor the Hong Kong government will admit the results of the poll. It would be ridiculous to determine the direction of Hong Kong’s political reform with this informal referendum. As a special administrative region of China, Hong Kong can’t launch any referendum without the authority of the central government. The country would fall into tumult if all regions conducted similar referendums. In particular, the electronic poll by Hong Kong’s opposition groups seems like a joke where it is highly possible to cheat. Who knows how many votes were fabricated? Throughout the world, we have never heard of making major political decisions via an electronic ballot. This “invention” is tinged with mincing ludicrousness.”
• But as voter turnout surpasses 700K, some Chinese state media and scholars changed to a more moderate stance. For example, Rao Geping, a member of the Basic Law Committee, said the public vote reflected the demand of some people in Hong Kong, even if it was not legally binding. « We can take it as a form of public opinion expressed by some people in Hong Kong…I am not sure if the turnout is accurate. I think it nonetheless reflects the demand of some people in Hong Kong, though I dare not say it’s a view adopted by everybody. So the Hong Kong government and the central government have to take it seriously.” The Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies vice-chairman Qi Pengfei agreed that although the turnout might have been exaggerated, the poll reflected the views of those who took part. Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said he disagreed with an editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper, which described turnout for the poll as « no match » for the 1.3 billion population of China.
• Meanwhile, Taiwan Sunflower Movement protest leader Chen Weiting, together with Lin Chi-hua, an academic at Soochow University in Taipei, who planned to join the July 1 rally, were denied entry to Hong Kong yesterday and deported back to Taiwan right away at the HK International Airport. Both attempted to enter HK with a Mainland Travel Permit for Taiwan Residents, known as « Tai Bao Zheng ». This permit supposedly allows Taiwanese a visa-free stay in the city for up to seven days. However, Immigration officers said that their permits were not valid anymore, although Chen’s permit would only expire in 2018.