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	Censoring the News before it Happens by Perry Link NY Review of Books   Every day in China, hundreds of messages are sent from government offices to website editors around the country that say things like, “Report on the new provincial budget tomorrow, but do not feature it on the front page, make no comparisons to earlier budgets, list no links, and say nothing that might raise questions”; “Downplay stories on Kim Jung-un’s facelift”; and “Allow stories on Deputy Mayor Zhang’s embezzlement but omit the comment boxes.”   Why, one might ask, do censors not play it safe and immediately block anything that comes anywhere near offending Beijing? Why the modulation and the fine-tuning?   In fact, for China’s Internet police, message control has grown to include many layers of meaning. Local authorities have a toolbox of phrases—fairly standard nationwide—that they use to offer guidance to website editors about dealing with sensitive topics. The harshest response is “completely and immediately delete.”   But with the rapid growth of difficult-to-control social media, a need has arisen for a wide range of more subtle alternatives. For stories that are acceptable, but only after proper pruning, the operative phrase is “first censor, then publish.”   For sensitive topics on which central media have already said something, the instructions may say “reprint Xinhua but nothing more.” For topics that cannot be avoided because they are already being widely discussed, there are such options as “mention without hyping,” “publish but only under small headlines,” “put only on back pages,” “close the comment boxes,” and “downplay as time passes.”   We know all this thanks in large part to Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at Berkeley, who leads the world in ferreting out and piecing together how Chinese Internet censorship works. Xiao and his staff have collected and organized a repository of more than 2,600 directives that website editors across China have received during the last ten years. Some are only a line or two long; others run to many pages. Some are verbatim, others are paraphrases. Some were collected from Twitter, Sina Weibo (China’s domestic Twitter), and Internet forums, while others were sent to Xiao by editors in China who were frustrated or angry—either at what the directives said or at the fact of censorship itself.   And as Xiao has discovered, the new censorship strategies show the government’s growing awareness of the power of social media. Informal news stories—often accompanied by photos from smart phones—now spread widely and quickly enough that official media lose credibility if they do not at least mention them. In such cases, “on the back page” might be the best option. Moreover, Web users now understand Internet censorship well enough that the issue can itself be one that angers them. (The traditional print and electronic media are censored, too, but directives for them arrive via unrecorded telephone calls, which are much harder to trace and seldom leak.   Because the Internet is too large to manage by telephone, its directives go out in writing.) Under the scrutiny of Web users, propaganda officials face the unwelcome task of censoring the Internet while trying to appear as though they are not—or at least not doing it “unreasonably.” This forces them to seek balance.   In one instance, a story about two policemen who were killed in an auto accident got out on the social media; censors anticipated an outcry if they “completely and immediately deleted,” so they allowed the story to appear but added the instruction “close comment boxes”—apparently from fear that the boxes might fill with cheers of the kind that normally spring from generalized resentment of the police.   China’s censors use much time and money restricting Internet speech. Consider this summary of directives government officials in Beijing sent to Hunan Province in June 2011 (it was leaked five months later):   All websites should conscientiously grasp the relevant principles and use them to purge any material that:   1) blackens the image of Party and state leaders or obfuscates the great historical achievements of the Party;   2) attacks our system or advocates the Western democratic system;   3) incites illegal assembly, petitioning, or “rights support” activity that harms social stability;   4) uses price rises, corruption cases, or other controversial events to spread rumors and incite hatred of officials, of police, or of the wealthy that could lead to activity offline;   5) incites ethnic hatred [of Han Chinese] that harms national unity;   6) attacks the Party’s systems of managing the media and the Internet by using the slanderous claim that we limit free speech.   But as Xiao has revealed, the censors expend even more effort on the parallel task of “guiding” expression in pro-government directions. When a story reflects well on the Party, Web editors receive instructions to “place prominently on the home page” or “immediately recirculate.”   Authorities also organize and pay for artificial pro-government expression in chat rooms and comment boxes. Provincial and local offices of External Propaganda and Party Propaganda hire staff at salaries of about US $100 per month (less, for part-time work) to post pro-government comments. It is hard to say how many salaried commenters exist nationwide, but estimates run to the high 100,000s.   Some of this commenting is outsourced as piece-work. A few years ago, people who agreed to do this work were given the satiric label “fifty-centers” because they were said to be paid fifty Chinese cents per post. By now there are commercial enterprises that contract for comment work. Even prisons do it; prisoners can earn sentence reductions for producing set numbers of pro-government comments.   The “fifty-cent” initiative has met with some problems, however. Posts for pay have become so repetitive and mechanical that Web users spot them easily. Such posts also run the risk of undermining opinion that might be genuinely pro-government, because they make any pro-government comment subject to the suspicion that it was done for money.   In some circles, mockery aimed at fifty-centers has expanded to include regime apologists of any kind. Someone who thinks that External Propaganda might actually be doing some good by watching the Internet is called a “self-employed fifty-center.” Westerners who praise the CCP are “foreign fifty-centers.”   http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jul/10/censoring-news-before-happens-china/ Visit the related web page
	The right to survive pregnancy and childbirth is implicit in the right to life by Nick Harvey, David Marr   July 2013   Would Kate and the Royal baby have survived in Africa, by Nick Harvey.   Having very recently become a parent, I finally have something in common with William and Kate apart from my British nationality. It was not an “easy” birth, if there is such a thing. In short, our little girl got stuck and needed to be wrested out using a suction pump. Her head was temporarily cone shaped as a result which made her look like a comedy alien.   So, while it was not exactly the Lindo wing of St. Mary’s, my daughter was lucky to be born in a well-equipped hospital with specialists on hand to ensure her big appearance was a success. But it got me thinking, what if we’d not made it to the hospital and there were no medical professionals to help? And I kept coming back to the same answer: my wife and child would likely be dead.   Every day, around 800 women die from causes linked to pregnancy and childbirth. And it will come as little surprise that the majority of these deaths occur in poor countries. What may come as more of a shock is the sheer size of the disparity: 99% of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries, largely in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.   Most deaths are caused by severe bleeding, infections, high blood pressure, disease and unsafe abortions. And the vast majority are easily preventable. But they are not prevented for a host of reasons including inadequate healthcare facilities, scarce or poorly trained medical staff as well as lack of health education and people’s distance from health facilities.   Doctors of the World runs programmes in places with some of the highest maternal and child mortality rates and every day our volunteer health professionals hear stories about the precariousness of pregnancy and childbirth.   Take Noor, for example, a 25-year-old Syrian woman living with her three young children in a refugee camp in North Bekaa, Lebanon.   “When I was eight months pregnant, I was stung by a scorpion and had to be taken to hospital,” she told us. “We had to pay 100,000 Lebanese pounds [around 50 euros] so that I could get some care. That’s a lot of money for me, but it was pay or die.”   We support hundreds of health centres across the globe that provide maternal, neonatal, and 24-hour emergency obstetric care for those who need it most as well as medical equipment, and training for medical personnel. We focus on health education and, because of stories like Noor’s, we also give financial help and advice, for instance, through microfinance programmes.   The good news is things are improving. Since 1990, maternal deaths worldwide have dropped by almost half, perhaps because improving maternal health was one of the eight Millennium Development Goals adopted by the international community in 2000.   But over three million newborn babies still die each year, and 2.6 million more are stillborn. In 2012 it was estimated that over 200 million women worldwide still have unmet family planning needs and over 20 million women will resort to a high-risk abortion.   And it’s not just in poor countries where people have problems accessing healthcare. At the clinic we run in east London for migrants and other vulnerable people one-third of our new patients had tried to register with a GP before coming to us and not succeeded. Two thirds of our service users had difficulty accessing healthcare in the past year because they didn’t know how, or they faced administrative barriers and were denied access.   The right to survive pregnancy and childbirth is implicit in the right to life, a fundamental right of women and children enshrined in all treaties, conventions and declarations made by the international community concerning human rights.   And this is your right wherever you’re from, whether you’re rich or poor.   Doctors of the World: http://www.doctorsoftheworld.org.uk/   22 July 2013   The toxic promise of stopping the boats is born out of delusion, writes David Marr from Australia.   Bribing Papua New Guinea to take our refugees may seem an unimaginable course for a civilised country to take. But this is Australia. We do xenophobia well. We shut our doors on Jews before the second world war. Our embassy officials were inspecting bottoms and backs to make sure people were white enough to emigrate here as late as the 1960s. And we had that world first: Tampa.   The shame goes way back. But Kevin Rudd has taken Australia lower than it has ever gone before. He had the relentless encouragement of Tony Abbott. But then beating up on boat people has always been a bipartisan business.   From the time that first boat arrived – the Kein Giang with five Vietnamese men on board – in April 1976, both sides of politics have made the same promise to the nation: to stop the boats, every single boat. There are too many coming now. Too many people are dying on the way. But we are not going to get anywhere while that toxic promise stays on the table.   It has licensed brutality towards boat people for nearly 40 years. When all this began, there was a constituency in this country for dealing decently with asylum seekers who came by sea. But the White Australia policy was barely cold in its grave. The fearful demanded fresh reassurance. So the decision was taken on both sides of politics to play to fear.   No leader since has had the courage to tell Australians what the rest of the world knows: that refugees flee however they may – by air, by land and by sea. Instead, every prime minister since the Kein Giang tied up in Darwin harbor has promoted the Australian delusion that it’s wrong – indeed evil – for refugees to climb into a boat.   Even under the sainted Malcolm Fraser those who came in boats were called “illegals” and “queue jumpers” and accused of “coming in by the back door”. Fraser bravely settled over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees but did everything he could to make sure they did not arrive under their own steam. Australian teams were at work in those days sabotaging refugee boats along the Malaysian coast.   Asylum seekers coming by air don’t trouble us. They aren’t dragged away from Tullamarine and thrown into immigration prisons. But we have spent the best part of 40 years devising new insults and tougher punishments for those who dare to do what asylum seekers do in the Persian Gulf, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean: arrive by sea.   Paul Keating introduced mandatory detention after about 200 Cambodians turned up in boats in one year. The Coalition backed the plan. Ever since, Australia has been saddled with a system that is expensive, cumbersome, cruel and fails to deter. Whether we hold asylum seekers on Christmas Island, in the middle of the desert or way out in the Pacific, the boats keep coming.   John Howard was a genius at mustering our fears of the boats. He pinched his policy from Pauline Hanson, who said: “We go out, we meet them, we fill them up with fuel, fill them up with food, give them medical supplies and we say, ‘Go that way.’” And that’s what Howard did. Boats sank. People died. The navy loathed the work. But pushing half a dozen boats back to Indonesia did make a big impact on the trade.   Howard was fearless in defence of … his constituency. He breached every decent tradition of the sea by refusing to land the men and women rescued by the Tampa and sent them off to Nauru. It was a dramatic message to an already dwindling trade, for the Taliban – the reason Hazaras were fleeing to Europe, America and Australia – had been contained by the Coalition of the Willing.   So the boats went away. Refugees weren’t drowning in the Indian Ocean. The detention centres were slowly cleared and family reunion resumed. We brought in more refugees from UNHCR centres abroad. That was all to the good. But were Australia’s borders more secure? Not in the slightest.   Rudd Mark I closed the camps on Manus and Nauru. These days the opposition calls that “putting the sugar back on the table”. Someone might remind Abbott and his spokesman for immigration, Scott Morrison, that the opposition under Brendan Nelson signed up to those reforms – only to renege under Malcolm Turnbull when the boats returned.   But Turnbull was a weakling. It took Abbott to work us up into a lather again over the boats. And he did it, insisting on the original toxic promise that a competent government, a patriotic government, must stop the boats. In the terms set by Abbott, terms long familiar to Australians and strange to Europeans, the arrival of a single boat is a mark of government failure.   So the barbarities returned. Malaysia was explored. Nauru and Manus were reoccupied. Family reunion ended. Applications for refugee status ceased. Thousands of asylum seekers were told they must wait indefinitely, forbidden to work, given enough support to keep them in poverty. And the boats came in record numbers.   Bogus asylum seekers must be weeded out and returned. The entry points of the trade – the airports of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur – must be plugged, as the foreign minister, Bob Carr, has gone some way to do in the last week. The criminal combines driving the trade must be broken. We need to redouble the help we give Indonesian police. Australia must make it easier – rather than harder – for asylum seekers to come by air.   But when all this is done, refugees will still use the sea. They always have and always will. It’s a surprise to no one but Australians. And while both sides of politics in this country argue for the one extreme outcome – no boats at all – we will continue to be tempted by extreme solutions such as dumping all boat people in PNG.   That it’s brilliant politics is a mark of how debased the politics of the boats has become. At some point we’re going to look back on this with the discomfort we feel reviewing our immigration policy before the war and the White Australia policy that really only died when those boats came down crammed with Vietnamese refugees.   Meanwhile let"s hope PNG doesn’t twig to what’s really going on here: we are paying it some enormous bribe and flattering the country to its face, while selling it to the world as the sort of place no one in their right mind, not even someone fleeing a well-based fear of persecution, would want to live. http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/ http://www.chilout.org/
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