Tibet Protests Raise Twin Ethics Issues: China’s Treatment of Dissidents and a Crackdown on New Media that Covers Protests
Mar 24th, 2008 • Posted in: NewsIncreasingly, sites with global reach find themselves in a profit-versus-responsibility dilemma
BEIJING
Events involving China last week raised ethics issues involving not only the nation’s treatment of Tibetan separatist protestors, but also its policies toward new-media outlets that may spread information about the actions of dissidents.
The BBC reports that after several days of denials, China admitted that anti-Beijing protests have spread beyond the Tibetan Autonomous Region, with heavy damage to government buildings during riots in Sichuan province.
BBC reports indicate that hundreds of troop carriers have been seen pouring into Tibetan areas, and that Tibetan exiles claim shots have been fired at monks and other protestors.
State media has blamed the dissidents and labeled some of the protestors as “mobsters,” according to the BBC.
The state-run Chinese Xinhua news service on Saturday ran a story characterizing the protests as “sabotage” led by the “Dalai Lama clique” and said that various Chinese communities in foreign nations have condemned the protests.
Authorities have placed limits on Western reporters, with a German journalist telling the BBC that he was the last foreign reporter forced out of the city of Lhasa.
But the technological evolution of the media has changed the parameters of old-style press controls, according to an analysis from the Agence France-Presse. China has had mixed results from its dictum that websites must stop posting audio-visual content, a move believed to be largely an effort to censor news about the unrest in Tibet.
The Chinese government initially imposed the audio-visual ban on all websites, but after harsh criticism from abroad, backed off and said private firms that were in business before the imposition of the rule and “in good standing” with the government could continue to offer such content, subject to censorship, according to reports from the AFP and the London-based Guardian.
According to the Wall Street Journal, access to the video site YouTube was shut down inside China after the site was flooded with graphic images from the Tibet demonstrations.
The Journal piece notes that the China confrontation is the latest in a string of incidents that is forcing YouTube, which is owned by Google, to balance ethical and economic considerations that are the inevitable consequences of its increasingly global reach.
“This is a situation that the company and all Internet companies will be facing in many countries with all types of political systems as the Internet matures and millions more people log on,” Robert Boorstin, Google’s director of policy communications in Washington, told the Journal. “At all times, our goal is to maximize the amount of information available to citizens around the world.”
Google faced its own censorship dilemma when it opened a search engine in China, reports the Journal, eventually agreeing to government censorship under the theory that some information flow was better than none at all.
Congress held hearings last year into the subject, examining how U.S. firms have helped the Chinese government censor content and identify pro-democracy Web users it wants to arrest.
Sources: Xinhua, Mar. 22 — Wall Street Journal, Mar. 21 — Guardian, Mar. 21 — BBC, Mar. 21 — AFP, Mar. 21.
For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 17 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 25 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 4 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 22 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 13, 2007.
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