China needs its press

Published: August 21 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 21 2006 03:00

A Beijing court is expected to rule shortly in the case of Ching Cheong,
a Hong Kong-based journalist charged with carrying out espionage on the
mainland for a foreign power. On past form, the verdict is a foregone
conclusion: he will be found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. Any
other outcome would be an astonishing departure from China's history of
punishing journalists who fall foul of its A?A-authorities.

The case has so far followed an all-too-familiar pattern. Mr Ching has
spent 16 months in detention and was charged four months after his
arrest, after supposedly making a "confession". No evidence for the
charges against him has been published and his one-day trial, from which
his family was barred, was staged in secrecy. Indeed, Beijing has
refused to confirm that it has happened at all.

Reporters Without Frontiers, a watchdog body, says more than 30
journalists are in jail in China, and half that number was arrested last
year. Mr Ching's case has attracted special attention because, unlike
most fellow unfortunates, he is not a mainland national but a citizen of
Hong Kong who holds a British overseas passport. He works for
Singapore's Straits Times, a government-owned newspaper in a country not
known as beacon of press freedom, and whose government has conspicuously
failed to press hard for his release.

Typically, China brings charges against journalists under its state
secrecy laws. These are so vague and so sweeping as to justify
prosecution for almost anything that displeases officials. In practice,
they are an instrument of state control in Beijing's suppression of
freedom of expression and debate. They are, moreover, enforced
inconsistently. The regime tolerates - and occasionally even encourages
- forthright media exposures when they serve purposes such as cleaning
up lower-level political corruption or fraud in state banks. But woe
betide journalists who dare to challenge the Communist party, especially
its top leaders.

Regrettably, such arbitrary treatment is all too common, particularly in
developing countries subject to autocratic rule. Invariably, it is a
tacit admission of vulnerability by basically insecure regimes, which
fear that if their citizens were told the truth, their own grip on power
would be weakened. Such defensiveness ill serves China's aspirations to
be respected worldwide as an emerging superpower.

Ultimately, Beijing may be as much a victim of its actions as are the
Chinese public and journalists. There is much evidence that governments
that systematically suppress information and dissent also cut themselves
off from those they govern. Losing touch with the public mood corrupts
judgment and decisions. For unaccountable regimes that enjoy only shaky
popular legitimacy, lack of openness can prove to be a high-risk policy.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006