I’ve always wondered, with so much censorship in China, how do all the information gatekeepers know what exactly to censor? Yes, many things are obviously controversial (like railing against the Party), but what about the specific people and events that never get taught in schools or mentioned in the media? Is there some kind of secret Xinhua Stylebook that gets distributed among censors to keep them in the know about what’s not supposed be in the know?
Thanks to Riding Sun and his find on this article, I can see that the answer appears to be “no”:
| A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday.
The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: “Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims”.
…Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said a young woman on the Chengdu Evening News classified section had allowed the ad to be published because she’d never heard of the June 4 crackdown. |
And apparently you can censor something so much that you actually start publicizing it.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 @ 12:31 pm on the category China, Politics.
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And now the newspaper’s editor-in-chief and two other editors have been fired because this woman didn’t know something she wasn’t supposed to know in the first place.
China newspaper editors sacked over Tiananmen ad
Although in all honesty, these editors should have known to inform people about the Tiananmen crackdown so that people wouldn’t be informed about the Tiananmen crackdown. Even to me that’s common sense.
↓ Quote | Posted June 8, 2007, 12:53 pmIt sounds like Catch-22 to me.
↓ Quote | Posted June 9, 2007, 9:21 am