CLB director Han Dongfang appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
The Internet: Podcast Dissidents
By Steve Friess
Newsweek International
October 9, 2006 issue
China has tried hard to keep Han Dongfang from communicating with the Chinese people. The democracy activist was jailed for 22 months and then forced to leave the mainland for organizing protests associated with the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. His name has been blocked over the years in Internet searches and his efforts to broadcast via radio have been all but thwarted by technology able to scramble radio waves.
Yet earlier this year, podcasts of Han's Hong Kong-based pro-worker commentary began circulating on the Internet, opening a new front in the high-tech battle between China and free-speech activists. In podcasts—audio and video files circulated online—those advocates may have found the ideal medium for breaching what critics call the Great Firewall of China. As yet, nobody's figured out how to scan such material for utterances of those telltale buzzwords that trigger the blocking of Web sites, e-mails and blogs. Filtering audio content is currently impossible, and a government ban on all audio or video e-mail attachments would cripple the nation's Internet communications.
It's unclear how many Chinese have iPods or other MP3 devices used for listening to podcasts, but more than 120 million use the Internet and 400 million carry mobile phones, according to government stats.
The new media are helping activists stay ahead in their cat-and-mouse game with the censors. A series of oral histories about Tiananmen posted in June on the Human Rights in China Web site (hrichina.org ) has been downloaded more than 17,000 times, says executive director Sharon Hom. The site plans to roll out other shows based on interviews with mainlanders about human-rights abuses in coming months. "We know that many more people have heard these voices because of the pass-along phenomenon that is very common in China," she says. Podcasting is more effective at reaching illiterate Chinese in rural areas than written material.
Even though the government can't block podcasts, self-censorship by many Web sites limits the availability of the more political ones. "Under this regime, unless there is some serious commitment to democratic reform, the crackdown will continue," says Hom. "Podcast is not a silver bullet, but it is an effort to explore all the possibilities of technology to keep a trickle of information flowing."