Reference Material: Accuracy in Media Speech on China's Great Firewall of Information Control

The following are remarks given by Sherrie Gossett on April 12, 2005 at a forum at the NY Press Club. The topic was French satellite provider Eutelsat's decision to terminate independent Chinese language TV station NTDTV's broadcast into China, following lucrative business contracts with China. Also discussed was the broader pattern of information control by Beijing.

April 14, 2005

I'd like to begin by taking you back in time to three events which reported the year before New Tang Dynasty Television was launched. (These events were reported by writer Ethan Guttman and by the Rand Corporation.)

January 2001: Three technology companies, Network Associates Technology, Symantec, and Trend Micro gained entry into the Chinese market by donating 300 live computer viruses to the Public Service Bureau - China's state police. The action raised Pentagon concerns about China's information warfare capabilities.

December 2001: A human rights activist accused Nortel of aiding and advancing China's repressive policies by enhancing digital surveillance technologies in use and by transferring technology developed for the FBI to the Chinese Ministry of State.

February 2002: A former Yahoo China executive confirmed the company routinely censors its site functions including chat rooms. Several Chinese engineers stepped forward to claim that in the late 1990's, technology giant Cisco provided Chinese authorities with a "special firewall box" to block web sites.

The events described are just a few bricks in the new Great Wall of China: the Great Firewall of information control. Now there's a breach in that wall; an unexpected breach. New Tang Dynasty Television, working from outside of China, has been beaming its programming into China, where some 40 million viewers can access it. New Tang Dynasty provides the only uncensored programming in Mandarin to reach China. Since its inception in 2002, NTD TV has increased its reach to 200 million viewers in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. This startling accomplishment is matched by an equally startling reaction. China clearly feels threatened by New Tang Dynasty TV. This is one source of information that is not controlled, not censored.

The Chinese state has used varied tactics to try to bring the firewall of information control to bear upon New Tang Dynasty. These tactics have included harassment, intimidation, revocation of visas, defamation, false accusations, and pressure from Chinese diplomats to have reporters ejected from events - even here in the United States this has happened. Two examples of this occurred in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. [New Tang Dynasty TV Vice President] Samuel Zhou can tell you more about that. Pressure has also followed the television network to Australia.

And now Paris-based EutelSAT has decided not to renew a contract, under which NTD TV uses Eutel satellites to broadcast to Asia and China. This despite the fact EutelSAT operates under a convention by which it is bound to uphold principles of equal access, diversity and non-discrimination.

EutelSAT claims it was not under any pressure from Chinese authorities. So why was it that NTD TV was able to produce, in a French courtroom, a copy of a letter from Chinese authorities demanding a halt to the station's programming?

Now it appears China and EutelSAT have made common cause in a campaign of dirty tricks. This unattractive corporate image may serve to militate against EutelSAT's plans to launch a successful IPO this year. EutelSAT wants to appear progressive, even as it bows to the imperial Chinese government, eager and willing to become an instrument of censorship and intimidation for the Chinese state.

This is all part of a pattern:

NTD TV had a contract with the Netherlands-based satellite operator New Skies Satellites. After only 3 days of broadcasting New Tang Dynasty programs, the satellite operator encrypted the signal, preventing Chinese satellite dish owners from being able to see the channel. This action followed reported threats of financial reprisals that were made by Chinese authorities to satellite representatives in Beijing.

In February of 2003 the Atlanta-based US satellite operator ADTH was reported to have broken an agreement to carry NTD TV, out of fear of losing contracts with other Chinese channels.

Reporters Without Borders, the international agency that defends press freedom, pointed out that China's state-owned CCTV is available in more than 30 satellite multi-channel packages, when only 6 would suffice to reach 99% of the world's population. Only 6 would be enough to reach 99% of the world's population! So why do they have 30? So they can leverage their massive presence to blackmail satellite operators.

The Great Firewall of information control might be invisible, but its victims and its effects are anything but immaterial. Western businessmen and businesswomen who are making these conscious decisions to help build this wall of shame, know what happens to those in China who try to breach the wall.

Many are caught, arrested, interrogated, and given harsh sentences for innocuous activities like downloading a file, expressing an opinion, or writing for an unauthorized website or publication.

These Western business leaders know that they are helping to uphold a structure of repression that results in imprisonment, physical and psychological torture, and often, complete loss of freedom. Some men and women are broken mentally. Others are killed.

Those who participate in the harassment and intimidation of New Tang Dynasty Television by carrying out the wishes of the Chinese state are not only contributing to this system of repression, they are actively extending the reach of the Chinese state, resulting in the violation of press freedom here in America and elsewhere in the West. They have become participants in a system of human rights violations and partners with one of the greatest human rights violators in the world: the Chinese state.

If these satellite operators do not have the common sense to feel shame and humiliation at being caught out in this game of dirty tricks that they've joined in on, we'll just have to help them out by giving the issue the media attention it deserves.

Accuracy in Media calls on other media organizations and outlets in the United States to do more in-depth reporting on this subject. Editorials can help pressure those individuals and organizations involved in targeting the press freedoms of New Tang Dynasty TV. Enterprise reporting will uncover facts about the situation that we don't now know. By reporting the facts and doing follow-up reporting, media can shine a light on this situation, which will send the opponents of press freedom scurrying like cockroaches.

Since its embrace of communism, China has sometimes given lip service to freedom, only to resort to repression whenever a threat of disorder is perceived. Rigid state control is a tonic for all ills, real or imagined.

China accepts no dissent, no philosophical challenge to the state, which reserves the sole right to define reality. Acting as a god, the state is the sole arbiter and dispenser of truth, the drawer of all boundaries, and as such, claims all obedience. The transcendent redefines boundaries, moving markers placed by the state. What is transcendent to the state challenges the authority of a state which projects itself as omnipotent. The transcendent is therefore impermissible. This is partly why China feels so threatened by Falun Gong and other spiritual movements that seek the transcendent, the immaterial, and power derived from a source other than the state.

Information is power too, and men and women hunger for it as much as they do spirituality and other forms of transcendence and wisdom.

The current Chinese state system and the Great Firewall of information control are a poor fit for the historical greatness of Chinese civilization. Chinese civilization is one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. For centuries, China provided the world with a gold standard of excellence in its bureaucratic sophistication, civil service innovations, arts and literature. China was famed not only for untold wealth, but also for many inventions and discoveries that we now take for granted in the West. These include shipping, papermaking, printing, gunpowder, the mariner's compass, astronomical observatories, modern agriculture, decimal mathematics, paper money, multi-stage rockets, brandy and whiskey, the game of chess, cast iron, the helicopter rotor and the propeller, the seismograph, and even the earliest understanding of circulation of the blood. This is just to mention a few.

The Chinese paved the way in theories of statecraft and strategies of warfare as well.

Now New Tang Dynasty TV is paving the way for a new information revolution. This is not a revolution whose goal is chaos, anarchy or disorder. It's a revolution characterized by reformation and innovation. It represents an outbreak of information power whose goal is the dissemination of knowledge and whose end is the orderly fostering of significant societal and human progress.

I hope you will join me and my colleagues at Accuracy in Media, MediaChannel.org, Reporters Without Borders, and the International Federation of Journalists, in bringing light to bear on this unconscionable violation of press freedom.

Here in America we have the freedom to speak out in the media when press freedoms are violated. Let's not take that freedom for granted by missing a great opportunity to use the power of media to protect New Tang Dynasty's freedom.

Thank you.