(Clearwisdom.net) The International Press Institute (IPI) headquartered in Vienna just released its "2005 World Press Freedom Review," which severely criticized China for lack of press freedom, especially Internet freedom.
The Voice of America (VOA) reported on March 30, 2006 that the IPI's annual report believed that freedom of the press in 2005 in the whole world was still threatened. The high death toll for journalists continued in 2005, with 65 journalists killed, including 23 journalists who died in Iraq.
The report states that it is ubiquitous that the Chinese government restricts the press by means of law and decrees. An IPI consultant in charge of coordinating work in the Asian area said to the reporter that the Chinese Communist regime continues regulating news dissemination, in particular the dissemination of Internet information. "People generally believe that the capitalist development featuring economic freedom would bring about political freedom, but it has not come into being in many Asian countries including China."
She took examples of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google that agreed under the pressure of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities to regulate on-line information according to the CCP's official standards, to explain that the CCP authorities suppressed press freedom last year and at the same time shifted its attention to cyber-dissidents. Of 31 Chinese journalists arrested last year, over a half of them published articles on the Internet against the authorities' decrees.
Nevertheless, she believed that the pressure of international public opinion is conducive to changing the situation of suppressing press freedom. She said that the satellite company, Eutelsat once stopped transmitting NTDTV programming, an independent television station, to the Asian area, but after public protest, it restored NTDTV's transmission.
