Former CCP Officials Call for End to Censorship, Criticize Current Regime

Maybe there is hope for real change in China, and therefore hope for the many peoples who have suffered under the Hu's government. From today's NYTimes.


Former Chinese Officials Demand Media Freedom

By MICHAEL WINES


BEIJING — A group of retired Communist Party officials and intellectuals issued an unusually blunt demand on Tuesday for total media freedom in China, stating that the current regime of censorship and government control of the press violates China’s constitution and debases the government’s claim to represent its citizens.

The document’s 20 signers, including academics and many former executives of China’s government-controlled press, have no public influence on the nation’s ruling coalition of Communist leaders. Some of them have issued other public demands for reform in past years, to no effect.

Still, the bluntness of their message — and its timing, coming days after the jailed intellectual Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — signaled that not all in the ruling establishment are content with the steadily tightening control over expression in the final years of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao’s leadership.

The letter’s language was notable for including an undisguised attack on the legality of censorship by the party’s Central Propaganda Department, which ultimately controls much of what is published, broadcast or posted on the Internet here.

“This is an invisible black hand,” the signers wrote of the department. “For their own reasons, they violate our Constitution, often ordering by telephone that the works of such and such a person cannot be published, or that such and such an event cannot be reported in the media. The officials who make the call do not leave their names, and the secrecy of the agents is protected, but you must heed their phone instructions.”

The “core demand,” the writers stated, was that China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, dismantle censorship procedures “in favor of a system of legal responsibility” for items that are freely published.

Some experts said that the demands, which were quickly squelched by censors after being posted on the Internet, were unlikely to have a serious impact on government policies.

“To the extent that people will learn about this letter, it resonates, because it shows there are different sensibilities within the party,” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. “But it does not, on the political level, alter the balance.”