Viral photos raise heat on Chinese policy
Last spring we all saw what can happen to a movement when a video of it goes viral on YouTube. That was the Kony 2012 video, showing the atrocities committed by the Ugandan rebel and calling world attention to the need for his capture.
About three weeks ago the world was shocked not by a mass murderer but a 22-year-old Chinese woman who was simply trying to have a second baby, only to see that 7-month fetus aborted by the Chinese government.
In China, husbands and wives are allowed one child only, and that policy has come under review after a firestorm was created by a viral set of pictures of a forced abortion performed on a 7-month-old fetus.
Firestorm ignited
The video of that aborted fetus was posted, and it has ignited a firestorm protest among Chinese over the government’s one-child-only policy. The video is all over the Web and several thousand viewers have already seen it and its clones on YouTube.
In the wake of that protest, the British newspaper The Telegraph, has noted: “An influential think-tank that advises China’s cabinet, called on authorities to consider ‘adjustments’ to the law and the introduction of a two-child policy ‘as soon as possible.’”
Family rule
Ms. Feng had violated the Chinese government family planning rule, but the consequence shocked and saddened her deeply, and her relatives said enough is enough and posted pictures of the fetus online.
The Economist magazine describes the photo this way:
“In the photographs the young mother lies on a clinic bed, her hair obscuring her face. She appears as inert as the baby lying beside her. But 23-year-old Feng Jianmei is still alive, whereas her baby girl is not. The baby was killed while still in the womb by an injection arranged by local family-planning officials. They restrained Ms Feng, who was seven months pregnant, and then induced her to give birth to the dead baby.
“Even three years ago, Ms Feng’s suffering might have gone unnoticed outside the remote village in the north-western province of Shaanxi where she lives—just another statistic in China’s family-planning programme. But her relatives uploaded the graphic pictures onto the internet, and soon microblogs had flashed them to millions of people across the country. Chinese citizens expressed their outrage online. It is not just the treatment of Ms Feng that they deplore. It is the one-child policy itself.”
Concern over policy
Actually, many government advisers have been worried that the policy has too many negative side-effects, not just for families but for the country as a whole. They have felt that the government should change its one-child policy to stave off an impending shortage of workers as well as avoid issues arising from an aged population.
The country’s one-child policy, begun in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping, was started after a huge baby boom in the 1950s unleashed fears of an impending demographic crisis. The brakes went on the large population growth, and Chinese officials assert that about 400 million births have been prevented over the past 30 years.
Bad side effects
But the policy brought with it a slew of negative side effects, including a rise in sex-selective abortions and even infanticide as rural families sought to have male offspring. The country’s population is now male-heavy, and CNN recently reported that some 24 million eligible grooms will find themselves without a bride by the year 2020 because there just won’t be enough women to marry.
The fact that the widespread protest in China and around the world resulted from a viral video is another example of global outrages brought to life for millions of people, courtesy of the Internet. Chalk one up for the good guys.
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Comments
This is absolutely a horrendous practice by the Chinese government. John Vivian also wrote, “Authoritarian controls can have short-term effectiveness, but truth is hard to suppress for very long.” This is more true than ever today, as the above blog shows, because of the Internet. If the Internet did not exist, would this poor woman’s story have ever been told? Probably not. At least, not to a mass audience. But because of Internet capabilities and media that allow users to tell the story, the truth is being heard. Not only is the truth being heard, but it’s influencing what could be very positive change for a large number of people.
Unfortunately, the Internet is the only tool and the only hope some people, especially those in developing countries, have to hold public officials (like the Chinese government) accountable. In a recent World Press Freedom Day discussion on Social Media (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boppf034528) a keynote speaker from Vietnam noted that the Internet has afforded Vietnamese citizens similar opportunities. “The government can’t control 100 percent of the Internet,” he said. For that reason, he and others have launched a 24/7 Internet radio show that allows them to avoid censorship and encourage fellow citizens to stand up for their own basic human rights.
The Internet is a true platform for truth–and freedom of the press. Accordingly, so is the individual, rather than a gatekeeping or censored reporter.
Basic math tells us that if every two people have only one child, the population of a country shrinks by half for each generation. Moral concerns aside, it is clear that a policy such as this is not in any way sustainable or healthy. This becomes even more true when gender preferences are taken into consideration.
What is interesting here is how the power of a viral web video overcame the censorship of the Chinese government. According to Willis, in an authoritarian model “the media should exist to support and advance the policies of the government in power and help stabilize the society in the way the ruling powers feel it should be stabilized.” This means that the traditional media was unable to report about this issue, and in the past it probably would have gone unnoticed. Today however, social and online media does not rely on traditional media sources and has the ability to reach large audiences without the approval of the regime in power. As this trend continues, I believe authoritarian regimes will be faced with rough waters going forward, being forced to make dramatic decisions to either stop access to the web entirely or censor it the extreme. Both scenarios are likely to cause public unrest.
I don’t want to make a judgment call on the “one child” policy itself. As you point out in your “International Reporting” presentation, media people have to be willing to step outside of the way they see the world personally. What I would like to talk about is China’s media censorship habit.
In an earlier module, you wrote media are a reflection of society, and that people within a society use that reflection to define themselves. For China, the government carefully crafts that reflection. However, the demand for Western media in China increases with their economy, and because of the Western ideals that are tied to that media, the Chinese people are being exposed to values outside of the traditional, collectivist values supported by the Chinese government.
Vivian wrote about how China is known for its unprecedented, pre-publication censorship. As its economy grows, and its middle class and the people who have access to the internet continue to increase, and people start to internalize some of the individualistic ideals that are embedded in the Western media they are consuming, the Chinese government is going to have to rethink its censorship policies, or at least its approach to censorship. Modern China is fighting against a world media that, as the Finnish president points out, is exceedingly Western. It will be interesting to see how traditionalist China manages its younger, predominately-male population, especially in relation to how those people use world media to define who they are as individuals and as a society.
I find this story deeply saddening. Following a frustrating and turbulent election season, it can be all too easy to wish things were different in the U.S., but stories like this remind me that people in other parts of the world face much bigger issues than a gridlocked Congress and women’s rights.
I think John Vivian put it best when he said, “China’s emergence as a global economic power hinges in part on its ability to tightly control mass media. Government policy is to let nothing interfere with the stability necessary for the nation’s economic engine to remain in high gear.” I might even go one step further and say China’s control isn’t limited to just media; rather, the Chinese government claims control of even the most basic human experiences, like parenting children. I know the Chinese government is committed to being an economic powerhouse, which is certainly a laudable goal, and the country was worried about the population boom of the 1950s. But what is the cost of China’s interference?
As John Milton said “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple: whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter.” That is, without a free exchange in the marketplace of ideas, something China is almost too afraid to let happen, the society must settle for bad ideas because they aren’t allowed to think anything else. While I can understand the government’s fear of loosening control, I also think they need to let the citizens live their lives and have their children.