winning press freedom conference

The Chinese authorities have no intention to give up on their struggle to control the Internet to fit their view of the world and keep a tight control on their country.

They will fight back no matter what, Tibet or not Tibet, censorship or not censorship, the Great Firewall of China or not.

And Julien Pain, Director of the France24 TV network’s website “Observers,” warned the Paris conference that this stubborn determination will take them even to export this obsessive control of the Internet.

Exporting Internet Censorship Chinese Style
By Julien Pain

When I worked for Reporters without Borders, we worked on Internet censorship. Now I am with France24 TV network.

A citizen in China with a cell phone can be a powerful free speech weapon. We collect amateur footage from this kind of citizen source for our network.

I’ll talk about my activist actions as a TV journalist. China is a world champion at censorship of forums, search engines like Google and other Internet features.

It’s frightening. We’ve seen it with Tibet. Chinese citizens are just not informed. I work for a TV station, and if there are no images, there’s no news.

The very first snapshots we saw of the Tibetan riots took 24 hours to get to us. Even in Burma, we get them two hours after the fact. There are technical obstacles that prevent immediate coverage. The second photo we got from Tibet was from observers of the uprising.

Then we got evidence of the first people who were killed. We knew there were about 100 people killed, but we couldn’t go on the air without proof. We had networks of Tibetans showing that the Army had shot demonstrators with real bullets.

So thanks to the Internet, and in spite of the automatic filters, we still managed to get information and news from China.

From my point of view, what I was most interested in was what happened after the event, the huge propaganda campaign on the Internet and the Paris and London events surrounding the run of the Olympic Torch.

On my website, for each article we post, we usually get six comments. But when we post articles about the Tibet uprising, we get 50 comments from China, more than from France. How is it that the Chinese used French over night?

But it got violent. We got insults against France and CNN in excellent French.

Where are those comments coming from? I can’t imagine Chinese people speaking French just like that. Why are they all of a sudden defending China, or are they Chinese living in France?

News from abroad really can disrupt your country and change public opinion. So all this is an admission of weakness by the Chinese authorities. It’s a different stage that’s begun, trying to export its ideas to foreign websites.

What’s most interesting about the Tibet crisis is to see that China has no hesitation to use the Internet to fight back. We publish all points of view both the pro-Tibet and the pro-Chinese positions.

China is using the Internet to convey its own ideas. We can’t focus on censorship because they’re less frightened about news coming to their country. They’re prepared to fight it out on our web sites.

There were so many comments from the Chinese point of view, you had the impression that they’d won the argument. This is going to be the challenge, much more worrisome than censorship in my opinion.

This constitutes an exportation of views and ideology in the new proactive mode, using the vehicle of the Internet in so doing.

Julien Pain is the Director of France 24 TV’s Web site “Observers.”