The aim of reviewing the southern media is to determine the following aspects of this study. Firstly, led by the Southern Weekly, southern media differ from microblogs, where the update of online news content is largely dependent on the uploading from its
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registered users. The southern media employ professional journalists and editors to work on the production of news, and provide them with strong support against administrative interference. Secondly, the review provides a historical context for a later stage of analysis which explains why the southern media are seen as ‘rebellious’ and ‘radical’ to the authorities. It also provides an argument that explains the historical and economic reasons for their liberal tradition. Reviewing the context of the southern media is central to analysing the news media’s influence on public opinion which is also mentioned by respondents in the interviews.
The southern media is a group of liberal and uncompromised media organisations which is often opposed to the authorities’ interference over the news media in China. Most of these media organisations are located in the south. To look into the historical and economic background of the southern media provides the political context of China’s activist journalists and their attempts to resist the administrative interference from the Communist Party and the government.
If there was a book on China’s modern history, Guangzhou would be an important chapter because a number of revolutions and incidents were initiated in and exploded out of this province. In 1839, shortly before the First Opium War, Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu ordered the confiscation and destruction of opium in Humen, Dongguan of Guangzhou.
The destruction of opium was seen as the casus belli of the First Anglo-Chinese War.
Dissent and a regional uprising organised by the Tongmenghui and Sun Yat-sen, a revolutionary and first president of the Republic of China, were launched in Guangzhou and nearby provinces from 1895, including the famous and tragic Second Guangzhou Uprising, also known as the Yellow Flower Mound Uprising. These anti-Qin Dynasty movements preceded the Xinhai Revolution (1911–1912), which overthrew China’s last
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imperial dynasty and established the Republic of China. In 1924, the Republic of China Military Academy (ROCMA) was founded in Huangpu in Guangzhou. It was the first modern military academy in China. It educated and generated army officers who contributed their military talents to the Kuomintang (KMT) army force and later fought in wars such as the Northern Expedition (1926–1928) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Both KMT and the Communist Party established their bases in Guangzhou of Guangdong: KMT’s central Party headquarters were relocated in Guangzhou in 1925, and Mao Zedong founded Political Weekly in the same city in 1927.
In economic terms, Guangdong has been one of the most developed areas in China for a century. It possesses a number of natural ports and well-equipped railway stations, and is geographically a neighbour of Hong Kong, a free-trade port and colony of the UK until 1997. All of these advantages make Guangzhou economically strong in trading, light industry and orientation. Currently, there are six special economic zones (SEZ) in China, and half of them (Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou) are in Guangdong.
3.5 Conclusion
Based on the literature reviewed, the theories of Confucian limited freedom of the right to speak, and the work on CCP’s propaganda, gatekeeping, judgement of news values, and construction of online news media, this chapter has provided an overview of the specific elements of Chinese history and philosophy that relate to the operation of censorship practices in China. The articulation of Confucian thought and its legacy provides historical and cultural perspectives for individual freedom in China. The reviews on the CCP’s earlier political proposition of media supervision, before the establishment
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of PRC and its propaganda strategy of presenting itself as the saviour of the Chinese nation, demonstrate how Maoism was associated with freedom of the press in China.
Lastly, the third part of this chapter has explored the mechanism of media censorship in China, from aspects of gatekeeping, news-value judgement of news workers, and construction of Chinese print and online news media. All of these establish the basis for the methodological frameworks that will be outlined in the next chapter, and will be analysed in the later chapters of 5, 6 and 7.
Speech crime was common in the 1960s and 1970s and a great number of people who criticised the authorities were convicted of it, but nowadays a single prosecution of a news worker or a critic may cause an enormous social response. An infamous instance is the case of Liu Xiaobo. Liu Xiaobo was portrayed as a rebel and sentenced to imprisonment for the crime of inciting subversion of state power, (Chen, 2010; BBC, 2010) whereas the Noble Prize committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2010 for ‘his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China’. While Liu Xiaobo was serving his time in prison, criticism and speculation damaged the Chinese government’s reputation.
Foreign and domestic media became concerned about China’s lack of free speech and questioned the Chinese government’s determination and efforts to improve the situation.
Furthermore, this chapter looks at the establishment and development of technological means that have been applied by the Chinese authorities to censor online content in China.
It is seen as the first level of the revised-pyramid model of online censorship construction.
By reviewing public reactions to and criticisms of these filtering and monitoring projects, this chapter provides a historical and political context to these technological means, to be referred to in the analysis of the whole picture behind the construction of online
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censorship, in later chapters. The next chapter will outline the theoretical approaches and research methods that have been used in this study, which aims to gather empirical data for the analysis of the other levels of online censorship: the censorship of the cyber police and the online news workers.
This last section starts with an introduction to the construction of online censorship in China, as an essential part of the research focus, namely, one of the five elements of the earlier identified, censorship inverted pyramid. It illustrates an inverted-pyramid with different levels of censorship mechanisms. This section therefore aims to explore the top level of the technological mechanism of Internet censorship, whereas the lower levels, including public security monitoring and the censorship and self-censorship protocol in the online newsroom, will be analysed in the following chapters.
The next chapter will detail the conceptual and methodological approaches used in this study. It will discuss the aims and methods of the investigation as providing thick description (Geertz, 1973) to the context of online news censorship in China. In addition, it will explore the rationale and strategy for field observation in the online newsroom and interviews of online news workers, in order to thematically analyse the protocols of online censorship in the processes of news production.