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Blogs, chatrooms and mobile phones have helped information about
Tibetan protests to stream out faster than ever, but China is also
harnessing technology, as well as fear, to stem the flow.
Internet users, journalists and campaign groups
are all scrambling for information as they try to build up an
independent picture of deadly protests and clampdowns in Tibet and
elsewhere in China in the past few days.
Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of Danwei.org, which
monitors China's media, said that new technology has forced the
authorities to promptly acknowledge events like the Tibetan
protests.
"They cannot lockdown a disaster
anymore," Goldkorn told AFP.
"Before the Internet, it was possible in
China to isolate an area because ordinary people did not have access
to information, but that is not possible now."
Tenement Palm, a China blog, has translated
conversations between Chinese netizens on what are called
microblogging sites, where short messages from mobiles are published
to selected friends or more widely.
The blog has collected dozens of
Chinese-language entries, many from people who say they are inside
Lhasa, although the accuracy of the information is often very
difficult to ascertain.
"Lhasa is rioting... school was closed...
fighting in the city is brutal," said one entry, posted on
Saturday, according to the site.
Travel blog forums, often used for people to
give tips for bypassing bureaucracy or recommending places to see,
have also become a useful source, posting photos or linking to
first-hand accounts.
However, some forums have also been used as a
propaganda tool for China, which has allowed angry posters to vent
their spleen against Tibetans.
"There is only one word for these
separatists who are trying to destroy our happiness -- kill,"
wrote a surfer from the southwestern city of Chongqing on popular
portal Sina.com.
Although such vitriol from both sides has been
spouted with abandon, solid witness accounts are much more difficult
to obtain, and digital images posted online have helped fill the
void.
The video-sharing website YouTube showed one
recording of a huge protest near Labrang monastery, in Sichuan,
which validated eyewitness reports of 4,000 people.
However, the site has been shut down in China
since Sunday to prevent the spread of such images, including clips
of the violent unrest in the Tibetan capital Lhasa that triggered a
virtual lockdown of the city.
But the sheer volume of information means that
verifying, rather than gathering, information has become the biggest
headache.
Kate Saunders, from the International Campaign
for Tibet, said the information flow was markedly different compared
to the 1989 anti-Chinese protests in the region.
"There is no way that the news would take
so long to get out now," she told AFP from London.
"(The amount of information) is
unprecedented, but it is not always helpful. It is much easier to
make mistakes with instant information."
Technology can also be a means of stifling the
flow.
"We foreign reporters all take precautions.
Some of us swap our SIM cards in our mobile phones, or just turn
them off," Tim Johnson, the Beijing bureau chief for McClatchy
Newspapers, said on his blog from Sichuan.
"That way, authorities cannot triangulate
mobile phone signals and figure out our locations."
One Westerner, who has spent the past two years
in Tibet but is now outside the country, has used several blogs and
microblogs to contact people inside Tibet.
But the source said that a lot of the
information remains difficult to verify.
"To be honest, the majority of (good)
information is off direct phone conversations on either landlines or
mobile phones," the Westerner, who did not want to give their
identity to protect sources inside Tibet, told AFP.
"The best weapon that the Chinese use are
fear and retribution. Not a single Tibetan will say anything to me.
The mere fact you have received or made international calls could
lead to interrogation."
-- AFP
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