China wants to convey an image of greater openness ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, but the pressure on information providers just keeps going up.
The latest victim is a resource few outside of China may have heard of. But it’s an essential source of information for some foreigners working in China, including U.N. agencies and charities.
A dozen officials visited the offices of Nick Young, Beijing-based editor of the China Development Brief, on July 4 and ordered him to cease publication of the Chinese-language edition. Can the English-language edition stay alive much longer?
The Brief is a non-profit publication that is a vital resource on many social issues in China today. It describes its mission as “to enhance constructive engagement between China and the world.” The Brief touches on how development aid is spent and how foreign corporations behave in China. Few have been spared from it's critical voice.
China is now dangling the threat that Young could be ordered from the country.
“I . . . am deemed guilty of conducting ‘unauthorized surveys’ in contravention of the 1983 Statistics Law, and have been ordered to desist. I have since been interviewed by the police section responsible for supervising foreigners in China.”
Young has sought to avoid confrontation with the government since beginning publication of the Brief in 1995.
To get a sense of the publication, look at who has helped fund it over the years: Oxfam Hong Kong, Save the Children UK, The Worldwide Fund for Nature, The Ford Foundation, The Japan Foundation, The Kadoorie Charitable Foundation and aid agencies of Canada, Australia and Britain.
As readers of this blog know, China already is leaning on foreign correspondents in China. By my count, seven correspondents from the United States (including myself), Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan and Spain have been called on the mat for criticism at the Foreign Ministry since late April.
Where is this crackdown coming from? I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s from within the Foreign Ministry. Only certain thing is that a free flow of information makes some Chinese officials increasingly nervous in the run-up to the Olympics.
Item: Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based advocacy group, noted the closure of the Brief in a statement and "warned diplomats and investors in China of a growing censorship of socio-economic news, preventing any reliable assessment of the real state of the country."
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