Citizen Reporters in China
Cell phones and Twitter accounts are upsetting the status quo in China.
When demonstrators turned out by the thousands in Xiamen, Fujian province, on China’s coast opposite Taiwan, police knew they had a different problem from normal. Protests by ordinary Chinese citizens, mostly against land seizures by pushy developers, take place by the score on a daily basis in China. They are a nuisance to the authorities, and worrisome, but they are ordinarily suppressed by large police contingents before things get out of hand.
Xiamen, on June 1 and 2 this year, was different. Not only was the demonstration much larger than usual—by some estimates 8–10,000 people—but also the demonstrators were summoned, essentially, by cell phone text messages and Internet blog sites.
The issue was an important one for Xiamen. A Taiwan developer had signed a contract with the city’s authorities to build a chemical factory for the production of paraxylene, a chemical compound essential for production of plastics, polyester, and other synthetic products. But the Tenglong Aromatic PX (Xiamen) Co. Ltd, as the corporation is called, attracted the critical attention of a U.S.-trained chemist at Xiamen University. Zhao Yufen organized a petition against the project, pointing out serious environmental dangers. He was ignored.
At this point, something of a spontaneous citizen mass protest began to organize itself. Xiamen, in pre-Communist days called Amoy, is a pleasant coastal town with gently rolling hills and a well-protected harbor that looks out across the Straits of Taiwan. The idea that a huge chemical combine might spread pollution and chemical poison throughout the city was quickly taken up by thousands of citizens, who sometimes hysterically described the project as a potential atomic bomb landing on the city. Feelings were becoming explosive.
As is usual in the case of demonstrations known about in advance, a large gathering of police was assembled by the municipal authorities to block a planned march. In early June, however, something unexpected happened. “Citizen reporters” armed with cell phones, digital cameras, “Twitter” accounts (Twitter is a website where people can post short messages of what they are doing at a particular moment in time), and contacts with other cell phones and websites, descended on Xiamen and began to report the events. Despite the success of the authorities in blocking certain websites with photographs of the demonstrations, the “citizen reporters” were able to keep one jump ahead of the watchdogs and inform Chinese in the area and beyond what was happening. (“The police are now blocking the road,” etc.)
People from all over southern China, particularly from the important Guangdong capital of Guangzhou tuned in. Then VOA and BBC caught on, along with several foreign newspapers. Finally, even the tightly strapped-down official Chinese press, at least in the form of the English-language China Daily in Beijing, started reporting the story. As a result, Beijing became alarmed at the level of local discontent in Xiamen, at the international publicity already growing, and ordered a halt to the Xiamen project pending “further studies.”
It was a victory for the demonstrators who wanted Xiamen to retain its pleasant environment. But victory also for the “citizen reporters” who emerged from apparently nowhere to act as, in effect, informational gadflies against China’s nanny system of news and information censorship. One particularly loquacious blogger and SMS-er was a young Chinese called Zola, a name presumably derived from the iconoclastic French novelist who exposed injustices in French society and in particular the government cover-up in the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Zola claims to have started his career as a vegetable farmer in Hunan province. In the course of descending on Xiamen for his “citizen reporting,” however, he was contacted by numerous other Chinese who wanted to protest evictions by developers or other social and economic injustices. Zola’s weblog, complete with his reports of personal expenses in travel and food and an accounting of financial contributions from Chinese citizens, was even translated by some foreigners following the Xiamen events.
The implications of the “citizen reporter” phenomenon for China’s future are huge. One of Zola’s colleagues made the interesting point that if cell phones and weblogs had been available to the citizens of Beijing in 1989, events in that democratic movement in Beijing would have turned out very differently. Two things come to mind from that comment: first, it is remarkable that young Chinese even know what happened in 1989, because the government has been so successful in suppressing the truth about the events. Second, the Chinese authorities themselves are well able to read the writing on the wall for themselves and their hold on power.
In fact, there is evidence that in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese Communist Party is lashing out against any elements in its society who might be considered carriers of “dissident ideas.” One of the hardest-hit communities has been foreign Christians. It is well known—to the authorities too, of course—that thousands of foreigners are in China for Christian missionary purposes, most of them filling English teaching positions at Chinese colleges. Between April and July, however, according to the China Aid Association, a Texas-based Chinese Christian-run monitor of persecution in China, no fewer than 100 foreigners have been expelled from China in a crackdown on missionary activity. This is the largest expulsion of foreign missionaries since the early 1950s, when the Communists were consolidating their power and throwing out foreign Christian missionaries and clergy whenever they could locate them.
One explanation for this preemptive crackdown is obvious enough: China knows that it will be targeted by innumerable foreign Christian missionary organizations during the Olympic Games and probably wants to disrupt that process as much as possible. But another explanation is more worrying and has serious foreign policy implications. China is sufficiently alarmed by Taiwan’s moves towards independence under President Chen Shuibian that it may seriously be considering preemptive military action against Taiwan. The only large and well-organized domestic group in China that might be opposed to the use of force to resolve the Taiwan issue are the country’s Christians.
If China used force against Taiwan between now and 2008, of course, it would almost certainly lose the Olympic Games. For that very reason, most China-watchers have been seriously doubtful that China would take any military action against Taiwan, if at all, before the end of the Games. But look at it from another direction: Taiwan might precisely like to use the “cover” of the Olympic Games to cut itself off completely from China. Even the fear of that happening could precipitate Chinese military action across the Straits.
Stay tuned: we may well be hearing more from the “citizen reporters.”
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Global Culture, Religious Liberty, War and Peace, Mon 30 Jul 2007
