JOURNALIST CHANG PING YET TO RECEIVE A WORK PERMIT

PUBLISHED ON TUESDAY 6 DECEMBER 2011.

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In an open letter in the Hong Kong government, Reporters Without Borders asks why the visa request by journalist Chang Ping remains unanswered.

6 December 2011

Donald Tsang 
Chief Executive 
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 
People’s Republic of China 
Tamar, Hong Kong

Immigration Dept. 
Immigration Tower, 
Wan Chai, Hong Kong

Dear Sir

Visa application by Mr. Zhang Ping

Reporters Without Borders, an organization that campaigns for freedom of the press and freedom of information, wishes to draw your attention to the case of Mr. Zhang Ping, also known as Chang Ping (长平). A journalist and blogger, he is a former deputy editor of Nanfang Zhoumo (南方周末) and for the past five months he has been unable to take up his post in Hong Kong as editor of the online magazine Sun Affairs(阳光时务), owned by Sun TV, which he was due to have started in July this year. Up till now, Zhang Ping has faced unexplained silence on the part of the Hong Kong Immigration Department.

After he was appointed to the post in March, Mr. Zhang Ping applied to your government’s Immigration Department for a work visa. As a general rule, applications of this kind are dealt with in four weeks. As of today, he has received no response, either accepting or rejecting his request. No explanation has been given for this silence. The department concerned has merely informed him that his application is under review.

This unusual and unexplained delay leads us to fear there has been direct political interference by the Beijing authorities with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in order to prevent the journalist from taking up his post with a newspaper that Chinese officialdom has had in its sights for several years. The recent blockage of the website of the Sun TV online magazine that he was meant to edit is not unrelated to our concerns. With no warning or explanation, the television station was refused permission by the Chinese authorities to broadcast its programmes by cable at the end of 2009.

On several occasions Mr. Zhang Ping, a respected journalist in China, has paid for his stand in favour of press freedom and his refusal to work under censorship. In 2008, he was dismissed as deputy editor of the daily Nandu Zhoukan Zazhi (应为南都周刊杂志) for publishing editorials on Tibet that were at odds with the official line. On 28 January this year, he was forced to resign from his post with Nanfang Baoye Jituan (南方报业集团) for refusing to make changes to articles he had written. Since then, he has been banned from publishing anything he has written in any medium, whether in newspapers or on the Internet. All of his articles published online have been deleted.

In the light of these worrying events, we request that you do all in you power to ensure that Mr. Zhang Ping’s work visa is granted without delay so that he can take up his appointment as soon as possible.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter and please accept my sincere regards.

Jean-François Julliard 
Secretary General, Reporters Without Borders

November 30, 2011 1:22 am

Talk is cheap in the world’s factory

By Rahul Jacob

Wang Yang, the Communist party secretary of Guangdong and the wealthy southern Chinese province’s most powerful official, has a nice populist touch. To honour the province’s 30m migrants from elsewhere in China who have made Guangdong the world’s largest factory, he last year invited a couple of hundred migrant workers to a movie about migrants.

More recently, he turned his charm on for executives from EDF, General Electric and Fujitsu at a meeting to discuss transforming Guangdong’s industrial base and attracting more high-tech companies.

That might be part of the reason, but dispassionate observers would say the lack of freedom of expression and the inability of people to vote is responsible for China’s shortcomings when it comes to innovation.Speaking about the need for more innovation, Mr Wang said China’s students lacked an innovative spirit. “Compared with students from developed countries, we still have a lot of room to improve,” he said. He blamed a culture of exams and a tendency for more than 2000 years to regard “a teacher’s answers as the final answer”.

Since Mr Wang took over as the province’s leader in 2007, Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily – known for its relatively hard-hitting coverage – increasingly reads like a propaganda sheet. Chang Ping, a well-respected Guangzhou columnist, is no longer able to write articles for the city’s newspapers.

Call it contagion, but some of this is travelling across the border to Hong Kong, which enjoys an autonomous city administration under the terms of its return to China in 1997 – and, notably, a robustly critical press. Mysteriously, however, Mr Chang’s employment visa to work in Hong Kong as the editor of a magazine has been delayed by Hong Kong’s immigration department for eight months.

Last month, Mr Wang is understood to have told Guangzhou’s editors to report more freely, but on Monday he clarified and said what he wanted was more good news.

Bright sparks

It’s hard to tell whether some celestial prankster has put something into Guangzhou’s water supply recently, but its citizens’ propensity to protest against the government’s initiatives is ever more innovative. Earlier this year, a teenager started a lone protest against the wasteful redecoration of an underground station. Another Guangzhou resident took on the city’s plan to light up the skyline at night, estimated to cost Rmb150m. He started a bizarre online effort to persuade people to shave their heads, arguing that this was a cheaper way to illuminate the city as the light bounced off their bald pates. Amazingly, 80 people joined this protest. Then, like a baton being passed effortlessly, a college student asked the city’s authorities to explain why they were spending so much money on lighting up the city’s buildings by the river. When she did not receive a satisfactory reply, she sent the authorities a rubber ball – a Chinese way of saying that the person receiving it is passing the buck.

In the past two weeks, when a couple of demonstrations turned violent after the police beat factory workers protesting a cut in wages, Mr Wang himself bore the brunt of the province’s scatological wit. Earlier this year, he had taken a leaf out of Bhutan’s playbook by suggesting that the province focus on well-being and happiness. “Happy Guangdong”, one of Mr Wang’s slogans, should now be changed to Rioting Guangdong, say his critics.

Civilized cities

This week, Guangzhou was selected as one of the finalists in China’s civilised city campaign. Guangzhou gets our vote as a far more civilised place than Linyi City in the northern province of Shandong, also a finalist. On the outskirts of Linyi City, reporters and well-wishers of the blind human rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, have been brutally beaten for trying to visit him. By contrast, for months Guangzhou’s pedestrian crossings have had volunteers wearing bright yellow sashes ushering people across. There is a need for such courtesy to be transported to the mass transit system. Line 3 features a station where both sides of the subway car open and people from one platform try to cross to another line by hurling themselves in the path of people disembarking from the train. It’s more like a rugby scrum than a rugby scrum. I have a few bruises to show for it.

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