Citizen journalists challenge Beijing

Tom Spender, Correspondent

• Last Updated: July 19. 2008 10:48PM UAE / July 19. 2008 6:48PM GMT

Wu Youming, a former police officer turned writer at his home in Tongxian, on the outskirts of Beijing. John Wu

BEIJING // Chinese authorities and the country’s bloggers are waging an online battle over push-ups. This is no pre-Olympic fitness craze, but attempts by the government to keep a lid on dissent.

Push-ups are what two youths were reported to have been doing on a river bridge in the remote town of Weng’an in Guizhou province on June 21 when a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Li Shufei, fell into the water and drowned.

That at least was the Chinese authorities’ version of events. But residents believe the boys raped the girl before tossing her into the river and that the truth was covered up because the boys are related to local government officials. About 30,000 people gathered in the city centre, overturning police cars and burning the multi-storey police building.

Within hours, pictures and videos of the riots taken on mobile phones proliferated on the internet – and the “cat and mouse” game between Chinese netizens – as internet users are known – and censors was on.

“By referencing push-ups, the people are showing their belief that the government always uses the most obvious lies and showing how little they trust it,” said Isaac Mao, a blogging pioneer in China.

Discussion boards filled with thousands of references to push-ups, users dodging the automated censors by employing software that multiplies postings too fast for them to be deleted and flips text so it reads from right to left or vertically instead of left to right.

Weng’an appears to represent a victory for the aggressive blogging community: after initially dismissing the protests, the authorities later announced that four officials of the Communist Party, local government and security in Weng’an had been sacked for “severe malfeasance” over the way they handled the schoolgirl’s death.

At the forefront of these bloggers is bespectacled Zhou Shugang, 26, who goes by the online alias of Zola after the 19th century French writer Emile Zola, and who has blazed a trail across China with his self-styled “citizen journalism”.

Zhou, who once sold vegetables in a village in Hunan province, now roams the country armed with a cell phone and a digital camera investigating the problems of ordinary Chinese and publishing his findings on his blog. He relies on donations from friends and online supporters to pay his way and uses technological know-how gleaned from time spent working in an IT firm to keep his website online and accessible.

In an e-mail interview, Zhou said he had found an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in Weng’an, with locals too scared to speak out.

“Locals don’t want to talk or be in front of the camera because they are afraid of the consequences. Gangsters or the government might come after them. So even if they do have evidence, they are too scared to present it,” he said.

Citizen journalists like Zhou also run serious risks. In January, a man who filmed a dispute between security officials and villagers over a rubbish dump was beaten to death by the officials.

Zhou himself said he had been arrested once while investigating a fraudulent get-rich-quick scheme involving ants and aphrodisiacs in north-eastern China. He was briefly imprisoned before having his photos deleted, his money taken and being put on a plane back to his hometown, he said.

Despite the dangers, Zhou revels in his fame and does his best to hype himself up, posting photos of himself with the dead schoolgirl’s family and doing push-ups on the bridge from which she fell.

“Some people support me, some people disagree and others envy me,” he said.

But there can be no doubt about the seriousness of his intent. He wrote: “Without press freedom you can’t make government accountable, you can’t have an independent legal system and so the nightmare deaths of girls like Li Shufei will continue.”

Zhou’s open flouting of authority shows that the government’s censorship system is nearing its limits, Isaac Mao said.

“There is no single way to protect yourself online against the government. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. As soon as a technique is discovered and shared online, the government will pick up on it and find a way to block it. It’s easier for the government because they control the technology – the root domains, the servers, the telecoms, the ISPs. They can take harsh actions,” he said.

“So the government side is strong. But bloggers create a support network, using social media to help each other survive.

“Ultimately, censorship won’t work. The government will reach its limitations very soon in terms of the resources they can put into censorship while the volume of user-generated content is increasing exponentially. They can’t stop the internet in China.”

Meanwhile, Zhou has set his sights on Beijing and next month’s Olympic games, which promise to be the biggest showdown yet between bloggers and the authorities.

“I will go to Beijing to record everything I’ve seen,” he said. “Upon gaining more attention, I will then found an independent news station online, gathering news from all non-governmental sources and allowing people to comment online.”

In Beijing, he will find a city under lockdown, with checkpoints on roads around the capital, X-ray machines at subway stations and more than 50,000 police on the streets.

Online, the situation is less clear. Beijing has had to unblock access to a number of websites – including Wikipedia, the BBC and blogging websites – to satisfy the International Olympic Committee that the press will have unfettered web access during the Games.

But analysts said the unblocking has been uneven across China and believe the authorities will not hesitate to shut down Chinese websites that do not censor what appears on their platforms.

“There is no question that the noose has been tightening on civil society in China in the run-up to the Olympics,” said Sara Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst, a social development organisation.

* The National