winning press freedom conference

The Great Firewall of China is not the only censorship fortification the Chinese authorities have built to stop the “foreign invaders.”

At the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, the regime has also erected a veritable Maginot Line of antennas and signal jammers that effectively covers the ears of the entire country.

Voice of Tibet, an attempt to bring news and information to that region, and its director, Oystein Alme, know all about this gagging system.

Chinese Jammers Play No Music
By Oystein Alme

It is a misconception from many sides and misinformed by the Chinese that Western journalists are against the Tibetans and that the Tibetans hate the Chinese people.

The criticism is based on what the Chinese authorities have committed to themselves. China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power.

The Chinese Constitution’s article 35 says freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and freedom of association are guaranteed.

What happened in Tibet, why did they risk their lives to protest? The debate has turned in different directions. What is happening in Tibet, and why did the demonstrations take place? The Dalai Lama travels the world to try to get an acceptable answer to their relationship with China in a peaceful way.

During the March 14 demonstrations in Lhasa, the police had vanished. The next day the police used brutal force, and at the same time, the footage came to the rest of the world, and covered half of the domestic news for a week.

Under normal circumstances, this would not have happened. Look now at how the Chinese authorities portray the Tibetans as criminals and terrorists, and the Dalai Lama as their master schemer and they say they can prove it.

The Chinese could not give the terrorist label to the Tibetans before March 14. The Dalai Lama has called it cultural genocide. The Tibetans say the ethnic Chinese moving into is a major problem of assimilation.

All the journalists and tourists were kicked out of Tibet, except those journalists who agreed to take guided tours of the conflict areas. You see that the monks were able to get to the journalists. They said, “We are not against the Olympics—we’re for them.” This is good example that the people of Tibet are for the Chinese people, not against them.

The Chinese government uses information and a media monopoly to bring the word of the party to the masses. They must control the message and prevent other messages to get in. That’s why jamming is so normal and used against us ever since we started our broadcasts.

There are two ways to jam. Since what we do is use shortwave transmission, the Chinese authorities jam long distance mainly in four cities, but they now use three cross jamming transmitters. The International Telecommunications Union is responsible for frequencies distribution. They’re supposed to address the jamming problem. But they tell us, “We know, others have made that complaint, but we don’t have any way of addressing China, so speak to someone else.”

The other way is ground-wave jamming, which uses small installations that can take out a city or a valley. They do some jamming locally, spending hundreds of millions of US dollars to jam and block access to foreign transmissions. In Tibet, they’ve built more than 100 jamming antennas that block us in cities and townships.

In China, it’s illegal to listen to our program. The dog will bark if someone’s coming. They can listen as long as the dog doesn’t bark. We beam to private satellite dish owners. The government threatens satellite companies to remove our dishes.

Voice of Tibet is very small with very limited resources. And China violates our freedom of speech. I’ve protested to the government of Norway. They think we’re trying to split Tibet from China. The jamming doesn’t stop at the border. You can’t even hear our transmission in Paris because it’s still jammed.

This is an important aspect that the people in China know very little about Tibet, only what they’ve heard from the monopoly sources in China. Foreign news doesn’t reach China or Tibet. It would be important to speak to Chinese authorities.

Some ask how we’re going to handle the opening ceremony. If you don’t respond to our demands, we’ll use the sanctions we have. The opening ceremony can be one of the ways we address it.

Oystein Alme is Director of Voice of Tibet, a station funded by the Norwegian government that broadcasts in Tibetan and Mandarin.