RFA's experiences in trying to get news to the Chinese people

Radio Free Asia is a private non-profit media company funded by the US Congress through a grant by The Broadcasting Board of Governors. Our job is act as free press in countries without indigenous free press. We do local and national news to the people of North Korea, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and China in Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan and Uyghur.

Our content fills a void in countries where journalists are subject to control, intimidation and censorship and we focus mainly on what's happening inside those countries - functioning as a surrogate for indigenous free press. Our numerous call-in shows, hotlines, message boards and blogs allow people to share thoughts and ideas which are otherwise forbidden topics - to engage in free speech.

For 11 years we have been doing this in China - creating a wide network of brave sources who know that when something breaks on human rights, press freedom, civil unrest, environmental and health issues, food prices, forced evictions, land seizures, corruption - RFA will be here.

We will investigate the issue - we will find independent confirmation - we will report the issue - and we will bring the hidden concerns of every day people into the light for examination.

RFA works with citizen journalists in all media - but we are vigilant in our commitment to journalistic integrity. If we can't completely confirm a story, we just hold it. Believe me, if we make a mistake, the Chinese press will run with it. [see slide people's daily.com false reports of Lhasa deaths] Also in this time of real-time citizen images, it is important to have the context of accurate reporting because imagery in a vacuum allows for distortion. One of the advantages RFA has is multiple language services - for example, if we get a story about Uyghur Muslims, we can look for independent confirmation among Mandarin speakers in the area.

RFA has aggressively covered Chinese cyber-censorship and its aftershocks. We break and cover closures of online forums and discussion sites, Web sites and blogs. We break and cover a lot of news the Chinese government censors out - such as the Tibet protests, Uyghur repression, persecution of rights lawyers and the Dongzhou villagers' growing community power - despite repeated attempted media black-outs.

We all know that China is the world's leading jailer of journalists and cyber-dissidents. Despite the fact that its city dwellers can now sample pizza from Pizza Hut and savor lattes from Starbucks, China remains what Natan Sharansky has called a "fear society."

Radio Free Asia provides a free flow of information into this "fear society" so that the people of China can learn what is happening in their country--including what their government doesn't want them to know.

Internet Example

I'd like to use RFAs Internet programming to illustrate just one aspect of the way China and RFA deal with each other.

RFA's Mandarin, Cantonese, Uyghur, and Tibetan Web sites have a unique connection to the people who live under Chinese censorship.

But if you try to access RFA's Web sites from China, you will most often get a "page not found" message. If you search the word "uyghur" on google.com from China, you will be taken not only to the official Chinese sites but also to a site in Uyghur language that explains the wonders of conversion from Islam. And if you type "RFA" in the search field of Google.cn, you get a single result: a link to a "Request for application" in the National Institutes of Health web site!

As you all know for our listeners the Web carries its own dangers. When Chinese readers go online, they do so under surveillance and often at great risk to themselves and their families. Rarely do they get a full picture; many sites are blacked out whether the users know it or not. The pages they visit are recorded, the content filtered, and their browsing patterns closely scrutinized. As you've heard, even Westerners are wary of the backlash of Chinese surveillance.

As a news organization, RFA operates in a highly unusual environment. RFA not only distributes its news, but we need to help our readers to outsmart Chinese censors. We know we are catering to people who might have to read the pages using proxy servers or via encrypted transmission services - so our radio broadcasts educate our target audience. It is a game of cat and mouse, and one that comes at a cost: the fear of getting caught.

Thankfully, technology allows us to make our content ever more portable on a network so informal that it has no visible shape but is very much alive. Message boards, e-mails, blogs and instant messages pick up where the government blocked us. Friends and family based in third countries post our articles on their own Web sites and then pass on the Web address. RFA news travels fast and well by fax, letters, phone, and word-of-mouth.

We know that when it matters most, our information get where it needs to go. Every day is a new race for technological advantage at speeds too fast to handicap--and with some notable victories.

However, our growing stature as a "go-to" news source in China also raises RFAs stature as a priority for Chinese press interference.

INTERFERENCE:

Speaking from RFAs perspective, China's arsenal of interference with free press is wide in scope, multi-layered, varied and comprehensive.

Our SW broadcasts are jammed [slide of jamming towers] in several creative ways - static, noise, music and competing programming.

One listener called into a program and played a sound recording of a traditional Chinese wind instrument and percussion instruments that the Chinese used to drown out the RFA broadcast.
One listener gave us some details on co-channeling: "Wherever there are RFA broadcasts, the channels are always pre-occupied by programs from the official radio station, Chinese National Radio (CNR). [RFAs] "China Week" program is broadcast at the same time with CNR's Great Family of Nationalities program. When CNR programs are not being broadcast, sound recordings of musical instruments fill up the RFA air waves. It is obvious that the Chinese government is directly confronting RFA. What "coincidence?"

Our listener mail can "get lost" on the way to RFA - one listener sent a letter to RFA from overseas because several of her attempts to send letters from China failed to reach us. She said "The mail seems to be lost at sea and never heard from again. I understand that China not only controls the media, but also controls the postal route to your station. I congratulate the listeners in China whenever I learn that their letters were able to reach your postal boxes successfully."

Attempts to discredit RFA since March 10, 2008, using the press include a China Daily story calling the Dalai Lama a "liar" and giving attribution to VOA and RFA for "repeating" these "lies" and pro-China third-party statements [see AP story on Havana issuing condemnation of criticism against China and falsely accusing RFA of a role in the Olympic Boycott movement].

RFA visas for news coverage in China are delayed or denied. In the past, an RFA reporter was even pulled off President Clinton's press pool on his way to Beijing. RFA has 2 official IOC accreditations and we have complied with every registration and information request required to have 2 RFA journalists cover the Beijing Olympics. We are hoping China will honor its express commitment to allow IOC accredited reporters into the event.

But the interference happens even on US soil in a variety of ways including cyber-attacks.

As you heard, recently, the issue of cyber-attacks traceable to servers in places in like Hong Kong and Shanghai has been high on the radar in the US and since the onset of the Tibet unrest - focused on human rights and pro-democracy groups, including Sharon Hom's Human Rights in China. An expert cited by the Washington Times noted: "China has some of the world's tightest government restrictions on the use of the Internet, which makes many observers skeptical that hacker gangs could operate from within China without government approval or acquiescence."

These attacks are clever and insidious - but most troubling are the spoofing and Poison Ivy type attacks. You want to be able to open an email from a known colleague or friend without having to question whether some outsider is impersonating that cyber identity and attaching a virus to seemingly normal communications. I can only assume one goal of such malicious "spoofing" is to undermine the trust amongst certain communities and free press. Trust is essential in our business.

One note on this pro-China nationalism of late, we have received many comments from Chinese RFA listeners who express empathy and support for Tibetans - they say things like "please let the Tibetans know that not all Han Chinese are bad" or "if the Tibetans are protesting, the government must have done something".

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to show you a couple of slides of why Radio Free Asia is a target of Chinese interference - Tibetan monks listening to RFA around a short-wave radio and pick-ups all over the world of RFA news including Time magazine, MSNBC, ABC News and The New York Times.

This is the power of free press.