Twenty-one years ago, tens of thousands students and their supporters, from blue-collar workers to scholars, from street vendors to newspaper reporters, went to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, asking for democracy and an end to corruption.
The communist regime responded with tanks and guns. Afterward, all Chinese media uniformly condemned the peaceful protesters as “anti-revolutionists” and praised the soldiers who fired at the citizens as heroes—“guards of the republic.”
For 21 years, the media in China has been extremely quiet about the June 4 massacre. It’s a taboo for anyone to mention in public.
Twenty-one years later, something changed. On June 1, International Children’s Day, the Southern Metropolitan News published an interesting set of cartoons on page B16, the cartoon section. The set, titled “Fake Children But With True, Childlike Fun,” showed five children realizing their childhood dreams to become a doctor, teacher, singer, soldier, and painter, respectively.
For each person, there was a pair of cartoons: One showed the person’s current career, and the other one showed how the individual had practiced for his or her dream career when young. For example, the singer’s childhood story was a cute little girl singing with a fake microphone made with sticks and a bottle.
What really caught people’s attention was the childhood story of the painter. The young boy was sketching on a board. He drew three tanks in a line, with a person standing in front of the tanks. There were only a few stokes for the person, so it was hard to tell whether that was a soldier holding a submachine gun or a person standing in front of tanks.
Some websites immediately linked this cartoon to the “tank man” at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The “tank man” was Mr. Wang Ruilin. He stood in front of a queue of tanks that were advancing to Tiananmen Square under orders of martial law. He used his body to stop iron war machines.
[xtypo_dropcap]T[/xtypo_dropcap]he Southern Metropolitan News was praised by netizens for having subtly mentioned the Tiananmen Square massacre, in spite of the ban.
Whether the cartoon was intended to do that or it was just perceived as doing so, we don’t know. But the cartoon of the child sketching tanks was taken out of the cartoon set published on the Southern Metropolitan News website, leaving all the other people with a childhood story but a blank spot for the painter.
This is not the first time that the Southern Metropolitan News did something controversial from the point of view of the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. Another example involves a commentary on the “hukou,” or household-registration system.
The communist regime responded with tanks and guns. Afterward, all Chinese media uniformly condemned the peaceful protesters as “anti-revolutionists” and praised the soldiers who fired at the citizens as heroes—“guards of the republic.”
For 21 years, the media in China has been extremely quiet about the June 4 massacre. It’s a taboo for anyone to mention in public.
Twenty-one years later, something changed. On June 1, International Children’s Day, the Southern Metropolitan News published an interesting set of cartoons on page B16, the cartoon section. The set, titled “Fake Children But With True, Childlike Fun,” showed five children realizing their childhood dreams to become a doctor, teacher, singer, soldier, and painter, respectively.
For each person, there was a pair of cartoons: One showed the person’s current career, and the other one showed how the individual had practiced for his or her dream career when young. For example, the singer’s childhood story was a cute little girl singing with a fake microphone made with sticks and a bottle.
What really caught people’s attention was the childhood story of the painter. The young boy was sketching on a board. He drew three tanks in a line, with a person standing in front of the tanks. There were only a few stokes for the person, so it was hard to tell whether that was a soldier holding a submachine gun or a person standing in front of tanks.
Some websites immediately linked this cartoon to the “tank man” at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The “tank man” was Mr. Wang Ruilin. He stood in front of a queue of tanks that were advancing to Tiananmen Square under orders of martial law. He used his body to stop iron war machines.
[xtypo_dropcap]T[/xtypo_dropcap]he Southern Metropolitan News was praised by netizens for having subtly mentioned the Tiananmen Square massacre, in spite of the ban.
Whether the cartoon was intended to do that or it was just perceived as doing so, we don’t know. But the cartoon of the child sketching tanks was taken out of the cartoon set published on the Southern Metropolitan News website, leaving all the other people with a childhood story but a blank spot for the painter.
Emperor Comes Last
This is not the first time that the Southern Metropolitan News did something controversial from the point of view of the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. Another example involves a commentary on the “hukou,” or household-registration system.
The hukou system was created to tie a person to one location, mainly his birthplace. A person could change his hukou to a different location if his work unit was willing to sponsor him by going through a lengthy process with the Public Security Bureau.
One of the major problems of the hukou system is that it separates farmers from city residents. Since China currently provides many social benefits to city residents only, farmers coming to the city for work can never enjoy social entitlements because of their village hukou. They can’t even enroll their children in schools due to lack of a city hukou.
On March 1, right before the annual National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (PPCC) in Beijing this year, the Economic Observer, the Southern Metropolitan News, and 11 other newspapers in China jointly published an editorial promoting the reform of the hukou system.
The 13 newspapers asked the “people’s representatives” to act for the people whom they were representing. This was a rare joint media action that was undertaken without government authorization.
[xtypo_dropcap]A[/xtypo_dropcap]nother heroic action taken by the Southern Metropolitan News was the publication on April 11 of an article by history scholar Hong Zhenquai, titled “Loving One’s Country Does Not Mean Loving the Imperial Court.” The article suggested that nowadays many people misunderstand the relationship between the people, the country, and the imperial court. The sitting government misleads people into believing that “loving the court is representative of loving the country.”
The correct relationship, as argued by Mencius, a philosopher from the fourth century B.C. who defended the teachings of Confucius against other philosophies, is that “people are the most important, followed by the country, with the emperor coming last.” The article makes a case for the people having oversight and control over the government.
In the setting of today’s China, the imperial court can be interpreted as the communist regime. The Southern Metropolitan News was hailed by many overseas Chinese and some anonymous bloggers in China for its boldness in directly targeting the ruling party.
The Southern Metropolitan News is a newspaper under the Southern Daily Group, one of the most liberal state-owned newspapers, headquartered in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province. When President Obama visited China in 2009, he gave an exclusive interview to Southern Metropolitan News’ sister company Southern Weekend.
These examples might suggest that the media in China is now enjoying a widening freedom. That would be wrong. The Central Propaganda Department still keeps a very tight control over the media.
On March 21, a day before Google announced its decision to stop censoring information on its Chinese site, Liu Yunshan, the head of the Central Propaganda Department, ordered a ban on the media’s reporting of 18 issues.
One of the major problems of the hukou system is that it separates farmers from city residents. Since China currently provides many social benefits to city residents only, farmers coming to the city for work can never enjoy social entitlements because of their village hukou. They can’t even enroll their children in schools due to lack of a city hukou.
On March 1, right before the annual National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (PPCC) in Beijing this year, the Economic Observer, the Southern Metropolitan News, and 11 other newspapers in China jointly published an editorial promoting the reform of the hukou system.
The 13 newspapers asked the “people’s representatives” to act for the people whom they were representing. This was a rare joint media action that was undertaken without government authorization.
[xtypo_dropcap]A[/xtypo_dropcap]nother heroic action taken by the Southern Metropolitan News was the publication on April 11 of an article by history scholar Hong Zhenquai, titled “Loving One’s Country Does Not Mean Loving the Imperial Court.” The article suggested that nowadays many people misunderstand the relationship between the people, the country, and the imperial court. The sitting government misleads people into believing that “loving the court is representative of loving the country.”
The correct relationship, as argued by Mencius, a philosopher from the fourth century B.C. who defended the teachings of Confucius against other philosophies, is that “people are the most important, followed by the country, with the emperor coming last.” The article makes a case for the people having oversight and control over the government.
In the setting of today’s China, the imperial court can be interpreted as the communist regime. The Southern Metropolitan News was hailed by many overseas Chinese and some anonymous bloggers in China for its boldness in directly targeting the ruling party.
The Southern Metropolitan News is a newspaper under the Southern Daily Group, one of the most liberal state-owned newspapers, headquartered in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province. When President Obama visited China in 2009, he gave an exclusive interview to Southern Metropolitan News’ sister company Southern Weekend.
Censorship and Conscience
These examples might suggest that the media in China is now enjoying a widening freedom. That would be wrong. The Central Propaganda Department still keeps a very tight control over the media.
On March 21, a day before Google announced its decision to stop censoring information on its Chinese site, Liu Yunshan, the head of the Central Propaganda Department, ordered a ban on the media’s reporting of 18 issues.
[xtypo_dropcap]T[/xtypo_dropcap]hese included the renminbi appreciation, official corruption, the high cost of medicine, food poisoning, turmoil in Xinjiang and Tibet, the gap between the rich and the poor, reform of the household-registration system, the unemployment of college graduates, corruption in handling Sichuan Earthquake donations, corruption of the police and gangsters in Chongqing, sky-rocketing real estate prices, and so on.
The media was also told that only Xinhua, the leading mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, could report on the renminbi appreciation and Google’s refusal to censor information in China. However, the media was allowed to criticize the United States.
On April 29, China enacted a secret law that places a greater onus on media companies not to reveal “state secrets” (with state secrets defined so broadly as to mean whatever the regime chooses the term to mean) and to cooperate with authorities investigating alleged violations.
After the joint editorial on the hukou system, the man who wrote the editorial, Zhang Hong, the deputy editor-in-chief of the Economic Observer, was fired. Other top managers at the Economic Observer received a serious warning from the Central Propaganda Department. Representatives to the NPC and PPCC were warned not to bring up the topic of household-registration system reform.
[xtypo_dropcap]T[/xtypo_dropcap]here is an unconfirmed report that Southern Metropolitan news editor Zhu Di, who published the article “Loving One’s Country Does Not Mean Loving the Imperial Court,” lost his job.
The Central Propaganda Department initially stopped the Southern Weekend newspaper from publishing its interview with President Obama. Not until the U.S. Embassy objected did the Propaganda Department give a green light. But it still killed two other articles. Southern Weekend then published the newspaper with a half page blanked out in protest.
Even in Hong Kong, which supposedly still has freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, the Chinese regime arranged on May 29 for the Hong Kong authorities to limit the exhibition of the sculptures of the new “Goddess of Democracy” and the “Pillar of Shame,” commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Then why do newspapers still dare to challenge the communist regime occasionally? In spite of its best efforts, the Central Propaganda Department is gradually losing control over the media. With increasing social problems, the influence of the Western values of democracy and freedom, and the access to true and uncensored information, the Chinese, including news reporters, are gradually rethinking and regaining their conscience and courage.
Chinese want to speak out, for it’s a tradition, passed from generation to generation, for the Chinese to do the right thing for their country and their fellowmen, even if doing so means losing one’s own head.
Twenty-one years ago, the students and their supporters honored this tradition with their blood and lives. Twenty-one years later, people with conscience are starting to fulfill their duties once again.
The media was also told that only Xinhua, the leading mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, could report on the renminbi appreciation and Google’s refusal to censor information in China. However, the media was allowed to criticize the United States.
On April 29, China enacted a secret law that places a greater onus on media companies not to reveal “state secrets” (with state secrets defined so broadly as to mean whatever the regime chooses the term to mean) and to cooperate with authorities investigating alleged violations.
After the joint editorial on the hukou system, the man who wrote the editorial, Zhang Hong, the deputy editor-in-chief of the Economic Observer, was fired. Other top managers at the Economic Observer received a serious warning from the Central Propaganda Department. Representatives to the NPC and PPCC were warned not to bring up the topic of household-registration system reform.
[xtypo_dropcap]T[/xtypo_dropcap]here is an unconfirmed report that Southern Metropolitan news editor Zhu Di, who published the article “Loving One’s Country Does Not Mean Loving the Imperial Court,” lost his job.
The Central Propaganda Department initially stopped the Southern Weekend newspaper from publishing its interview with President Obama. Not until the U.S. Embassy objected did the Propaganda Department give a green light. But it still killed two other articles. Southern Weekend then published the newspaper with a half page blanked out in protest.
Even in Hong Kong, which supposedly still has freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, the Chinese regime arranged on May 29 for the Hong Kong authorities to limit the exhibition of the sculptures of the new “Goddess of Democracy” and the “Pillar of Shame,” commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Then why do newspapers still dare to challenge the communist regime occasionally? In spite of its best efforts, the Central Propaganda Department is gradually losing control over the media. With increasing social problems, the influence of the Western values of democracy and freedom, and the access to true and uncensored information, the Chinese, including news reporters, are gradually rethinking and regaining their conscience and courage.
Chinese want to speak out, for it’s a tradition, passed from generation to generation, for the Chinese to do the right thing for their country and their fellowmen, even if doing so means losing one’s own head.
Twenty-one years ago, the students and their supporters honored this tradition with their blood and lives. Twenty-one years later, people with conscience are starting to fulfill their duties once again.
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