26 June
Follow-up on Emergency Response Law
The only hope remaining of killing this ugly law is for the National People's Congress Standing Committe, where the law has been submitted, to reject it. To do that, the country's media outlets have to start raising hell, right now. They should cover the hell out of it, with a rapid fire of analyses, interviews with legal experts, and most important, op-ed pieces blasting it.
Whoever's behind this vicious bill, they have issued no ban so far on the media covering this. And this provides a precious window for the country's press and broadcast news organizations to act. The window may last only a few days. It's time to act. The conspirators picked a good time to publicize about it: a humid, sleepy Sunday when hardly anybody's reading the newspapers. And, in typical Xinhua-Governent style, the the part about restricting press freedom is buried in the last paragraph of the story. Had it not for the attention-grabbing headline by Sina news, it could just pass as another uninteresting piece of legislative news.
Meanwhile, foreign press is promptly starting to realize what's wrong with this law and what it means for the Chinese press: here are Reuters, UPI and AFP coverage.
In the blogsphere, at least there is some domestic protest already: Lian Hongyang's Blog (Chinese) modestly calls that clause "questionable", but makes a sound point by saying that the "rules" the law stipulates that media must comply with in reporting on disasters should not have been set at all. Also, the author points to inconsistencies between the new law's malicious clauses and recent government directives aiming at increasing transparency. Apparently not everybody is as dumb as Xinhua. 
工具 
說明
