Top Developments
•  More access for foreign reporters, tighter rules for local assistants.
•  As online use grows, government censors sites, jails critics.

Key Statistic
24: Journalists jailed as of December 1, 2009.

While China’s ruling communist party celebrated 60 years in power in 2009, its critics commemorated antigovernment movements in Tibet in 1949 and Tiananmen Square in 1989. Government agencies used a security apparatus strengthened for the 2008 Olympics to restrict dissenting voices during all three landmark anniversaries.

New York, January 19, 2010—Foreign correspondents in Beijing told the Committee to Protect Journalists that they are aware of recent hacker attacks on colleagues’ Gmail accounts, and said they have long assumed that their e-mail is monitored and vulnerable to attack.

According to a Monday posting on the Foreign Correspondents Club of China Web site, “Foreign correspondents in a few bureaus in Beijing have recently discovered that their Gmail accounts had been hijacked.” In its posting, the FCCC said e-mails in the affected accounts were being forwarded to strangers’ addresses. Google spokesman Scott Rubin told CPJ today he had no comment on the FCCC posting.

New York, January 13, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern today after Google said Tuesday it had uncovered evidence of cyber attackers from China targeting its own and other companies’ infrastructures, as well as individual Gmail accounts. CPJ welcomed Google’s statement that it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, in light of the discovery.

"We are concerned that threats to e-mail security undermine the safety of journalists working in China, their assistants, and their local sources,” said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney, who is CPJ’s representative to the board of the Global Network Initiative. “Google’s refusal to continue censoring content is a welcome example of the positive role international companies can play in demanding that China improve access to information.”

New York, January 7, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Xining provincial court in Qinghai province to allow imprisoned Tibetan documentary filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen to appeal a six-year prison sentence he was given last week.

The appeal period expires today, but the journalist was unable to file after being denied access to his chosen lawyer, according to his Switzerland-based film company, Filming for Tibet. His family has not been formally notified of his trial or the verdict, the company said in a statement. CPJ was unable to reach the filmmaker’s wife, Lhamo Tso, by phone.

New York, November 24, 2009—After almost 18 months in detention, prominent Internet publisher and human rights activist Huang Qi was sentenced to three years imprisonment on Monday by a court in Wuhou in China’s Sichuan province. The sentencing hearing lasted 10 minutes, according to international news reports. Police in Chengdu detained Huang on June 10, 2008, on charges of illegally holding state secrets and convicted him in August. Huang had been a prominent critic of the government’s response to the Sichuan earthquake disaster in May 2008.

“Huang’s verdict is a painful continuation of the crackdown on the media that eventually followed the terrible disaster in Sichuan that took so many lives,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “China has still not learned to live with the values of open media and public service, which are embodied in Huang Qi’s journalism.”