In Latest Upheaval, China Applies New Strategies to Control Flow of Information

In Latest Upheaval, China Applies New Strategies to Control Flow of Information


By MICHAEL WINES
Published: July 6, 2009

BEIJING — In the wake of Sunday’s deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China’s central government took all the usual steps to enshrine its version of events as received wisdom: it crippled Internet service; blocked Twitter’s micro-blogs; purged search engines of unapproved references to the violence; saturated the Chinese media with the state-sanctioned story.

The New York Times


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It also took one most unusual step: Hours after troops quelled the protests, in which 156 people were reported killed, the state invited foreign journalists on an official trip to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital and the site of the unrest, “to know better about the riots.” Indeed, it set up a media center at a downtown hotel — with a hefty discount on rooms — to keep arriving reporters abreast of events.

It is a far cry from Beijing’s reaction 11 years ago to ethnic violence elsewhere in Xinjiang, when officials sealed off an entire city and refused to say what happened or how many people had died. And it reflects lessons learned from the military crackdown in Tibet 17 months ago. While foreign reporters were banned from Tibet, then and now, Chinese authorities rallied domestic support by blaming outside agitators, but were widely condemned overseas.

As the Internet and other media raise new challenges to China’s version of the truth, China is finding new ways not just to suppress bad news at the source, but also to spin whatever unflattering tidbits escape its control.

“They’re getting more sophisticated. They learn from past mistakes,” said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who closely follows the Chinese government’s efforts to manage the flow of information.

Chinese experts clearly have studied the so-called color revolutions — in Georgia and Ukraine, and last month’s protests in Iran — for the ways that the Internet and mobile communication devices helped protesters organize and reach the outside world, and for ways that governments sought to counter them.

In Tibet, Chinese rallied behind the government’s assertion that violence there was an effort by the exiled Dalai Lama to break the nation apart. But China’s global image took a drubbing after Tibetan dissidents beamed images of violence to the outside world from cellphone cameras, and officials barred virtually all foreigners from entering the supposedly peaceful region.

Cellphone videos posted during the Tibet unrest led the government to block YouTube then, a tactic repeated in advance of the Tiananmen Square anniversary last month. YouTube remained blocked this week. Officials are systematically tearing down satellite dishes across the region, eliminating uncensored foreign television and radio broadcasts.

In Urumqi this week, the official response to one of the most violent riots in decades has taken two divergent paths. Internally, censors tightly controlled media coverage of the unrest and sought to disable the social networks that opponents might use to organize more demonstrations. Cellphone calls to Urumqi and nearby areas have largely been blocked. Twitter was shut down nationwide at midday Monday; a Chinese equivalent, Fanfou, was running, but Urumqi-related searches were blocked.

Chinese search engines no longer give replies for searches related to the violence. Results of a Google search on Monday for “Xinjiang rioting” turned up many links that had already been deleted on such well-trafficked Chinese Internet forums as Mop and Tianya.

State television has focused primarily, though not totally, on scenes of violence directed against China’s ethnic Han majority. Chinese news Web sites carry official accounts of the unrest, but readers are generally blocked from posting comments.

As in Tibet, blame for the violence has been aimed at outside agitators bent on splitting China — in this case, the World Uighur Congress, an exile group whose president, Rebiya Kadeer, is a Uighur businesswoman now living in Washington.

State news agency reports assert that Chinese authorities have intercepted telephone conversations linking Ms. Kadeer to the protests. The exile group has condemned the violence and denies any role in fomenting it.

On the surface, at least, the government’s approach to the outside world has been markedly different. By Monday morning, the State Council Information Office, the top-level government public-relations agency, had invited foreign journalists to Urumqi to report firsthand on the riots.

Arriving reporters were escorted by bus to the hotel downtown, where the media room offered photographers compact discs filled with pictures, videos and television “screen grabs” taken by state news organizations. Reporters were advised to attend a news conference Tuesday morning for an update.

Such services lift a page from the tactics that Western organizations, from the White House to major business groups, employ to get their message to traveling journalists. But at least some of the similarities end there: in Urumqi, journalists were told that they could not conduct interviews on their own, away from government minders. Other details beyond approved news reports were scant.

Even that degree of openness is a departure from a government tradition of closed-mouth reactions to unpleasant news. But just as in the West, Mr. Xiao at Berkeley argued, the aim of controlling what is reported remains the same.

The government “has revealed what they learned from handling the Tibet situation,” he said. “For Twitter or the Internet, when they see too many factors they cannot completely control, they shut down and block. But for foreign journalists, they feel that as long as they can keep those people under control, it may serve better the government’s purpose.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting.