AFP: China to allow BBC to resume broadcasting when it fixes "violations"

Thursday, 11-Jul-2002 8:40AM

BEIJING, July 11 (AFP) - China said Thursday it was willing to allow the British Broadcasting Corporation to resume its limited broadcasting rights within the country as long as the company took measures to resolve broadcast "violations".

"The BBC repeatedly violated an agreement it signed with the China International TV Corporation (CITVC) this year," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.

"So the Chinese company halted the transmission of BBC broadcasts to China."

Liu refused to specify the nature of the violations, but the BBC in London said last week that it was probably linked to a report on the [persecuted] Falun Gong spiritual movement.

"The timing of the resumption of BBC broadcasts depends on measures the British media company takes to resolve the problem," Liu added without further elaboration.

A BBC spokeswoman said last Friday that the [Falun Gong] item had run repeatedly on the channel's hourly news bulletin over June 30 and July 1 as part of its fifth anniversary coverage of Hong Kong's return to China.

BBC World -- which is only available at upmarket hotels and a small number of foreigners' residence compounds in China -- could still be viewed in Asia via PanAmSat 2, 8 and 10, she said.

[...]

Rights groups say tens of thousands of Falun Gong adherents have been jailed or sent to labor camps in recent years, while the group alleges that hundreds of followers have died in custody, mostly from beatings and maltreatment.

A journalism advocacy group also last Friday condemned the Chinese action and called for the ban to be lifted.

"The Chinese authorities are once again showing that to them, freedom of expression just means favourable articles and reports," said Robert Menard of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

"We fear that this kind of measure will lead international media distributed in China to exercise self-censorship when it comes to sensitive topics."

http://www.ptd.net/webnews/wed/br/Qchina-britain-bbc.RARw_ClB.html

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