overthrowing a longtime dictator? Not according to China's state
media, which is painting them as the kind of chaos that comes with
Western-style democracy.
The recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia are no doubt giving pause to
many authoritarian regimes around the world, but nowhere else appears
to be as determined to control the message as China.
Chinese censors have blocked the ability to search the term "Egypt" on
microblogging sites, and user comments that draw parallels to China
have been deleted from Internet forums. The People's Daily, the
flagship newspaper of the Communist Party, carried only a short report
Thursday saying Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would not stand for
re-election.
While there is little chance the protests could spark demonstrations
in China, the extent to which the long-ruling Communist Party is
censoring the story underscores how wary it is of any potential source
of unrest that might threaten its hold on power.
"Of course, the government doesn't want to see more comments on (the
protests), because stability is what they want," said Zhan Jian, a
professor with the Media Department at the China Youth University for
Political Sciences.
Elsewhere, authoritarian leaders from Madagascar to Iran have put
their own spin on the Egyptian and Tunisian protests to justify their
staying in power.
In some countries, including Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea and North
Korea, the media strategy seems to be to ignore the protests, with
little or no coverage. Others have used the media to reinforce their
message.
State-controlled television in the Ivory Coast has shown looting in
Tunisia, explaining that is the cost of the country's leader stepping
down. The unstated context: the Ivorian president is refusing to leave
office two months after losing an election.
In Zimbabwe, media loyal to longtime President Robert Mugabe have
portrayed the protests as anti-imperialist, an uprising against
Egypt's leader because he is close to the U.S. "This is exactly what
happens when sovereign governments sup with the devil," the state-run
Daily Mail said.
But Zimbabweans can still cluster around TVs in sports clubs and bars,
which have been switched from the usual sports programs to blanket
coverage of the protests on Al-Jazeera and other satellite news
channels.
Not so in China, where CNN and BBC are not widely available, and many
are getting only the government version of events.
Those accounts have focused on the chaos and ignored protester
complaints about autocracy and corruption, both sensitive topics in
China. The reports have also highlighted the government's dispatching
several chartered planes to rescue hundreds of stranded Chinese.
Online, searching for the term "Egypt" on microblogging sites, which
draw millions of users, brings up the message: "According to relevant
laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei gave the government's routine
denial of online censorship Tuesday, saying: "China's Internet is
open."
But Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China, and sensitive topics
are regularly scrubbed from websites by the country's extensive
Internet monitoring system, known as the Great Firewall.
China's attempts to restrict debate and sanitize reports echo its
handling of earlier mass protests, said Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs
Danwei.org, a website that tracks the media and Internet in China.
"It's almost the same reaction as when there were the color
revolutions in Eastern Europe," he said. "The aim of it is to
discourage people from making parallels with China and ... from seeing
this as part of a global people power movement."
An editorial in the Global Times, a state-run newspaper, said such
uprisings won't bring true democracy.
"As a general concept, democracy has been accepted by most people. But
when it comes to political systems, the Western model is only one of a
few options. It takes time and effort to apply democracy to different
countries, and to do so without the turmoil of revolution," the paper
said Sunday.
Two days later, the same publication took a swipe at the United States
for backing authoritarian governments in order to uphold its interests
in the Middle East, saying that "contradicts their so-called
democratic politics."
China's message to its own people is clear, Goldkorn said.
"The Chinese government's take is that chaos is harmful for a
developing country: 'Look what happens when people go in the
streets,'" he said. "The Global Times frames everything as 'This is
the danger of Western-style democracy.'"
___
Associated Press writers Lova Soarabary in Antananarivo, Madagascar;
Rukmini Callimachi in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and Angus Shaw in Harare,
Zimbabwe, contributed to this report.
