RSF calls on democracies to step up pressure on China to end censorship

Paris, Jul 16 (IANS): Five years after the passing of 2004 RSF Award laureate and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Liu Xiaobo, who embodied the Chinese people’s fight for press freedom and died on July 13, 2017 of an untreated cancer while in detention, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on the international community to significantly step up pressure on the Chinese regime to put an end to its policy of censorship and media surveillance and to ensure the full exercise of press freedom, a right enshrined in Article 35 of its Constitution.

Liu Xiaobo, political commentator and writer, author of nearly 800 essays, was a long-time advocate of political reforms and human rights, including press freedom. During the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Liu had taken an active role as a pro-democracy protester and launched a hunger strike in support of the students.

In the following years, in retaliation for his writing and activism, he was imprisoned many times, sent to reeducation facilities and put in house arrest.

In 2009, Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” for contributing to the Charter 08, a 19-point program initially signed by 303 academics and intellectuals that called for greater political freedoms, including the enforcement of press freedom.

Liu died in 2017, six weeks after diagnosis that he was terminally ill and the regime’s refusal of overseas treatment.

The regime also persecuted Liu Xiaobo’s widow, poet and photographer Liu Xia, who was kept under house arrest from 2010 to 2018 until she was finally allowed exile in Germany.

In China, detained journalists are almost systematically subjected to mistreatment and denied medical care: in 2017, political commentator Yang Tongyan died from an untreated cancer while in detention. Kunchok Jinpa, a leading source of information about Tibet for journalists, died in 2021 as a result of ill-treatment in prison.

In 2021 RSF published an unprecedented investigative report which reveals the campaign of repression led by Beijing against journalism and the right to information worldwide.