Saturday, January 19, 2008

Citizen Journalists pays the ultimate price




Wei Wenhau: the first citizen journalist to be killed? | Newsblog | Guardian Unlimited: "Tianmen."

Chinese man is murdered for filming a fight between city officials and villagers.


"On Monday, Wei Wenhau accidentally found himself a witness to a confrontation in the town where he lived in Hubei, a central Chinese province.

Villagers were quarreling with city officials who had arrived in the area to dump waste near their homes. When the officials started to unload the rubbish, a scuffle broke out.

Wenhau worked at a senior level for a construction company and was also a member of the Communist party. He was an upstanding member of the community and on seeing the violence he thought he'd record it.

Reports indicate that Wenhau was hauled out of his car and set on by all the government workers - about 50 of them. He was reportedly attacked for a period of five minutes."


The story of Wei Wenhau's death only came to light as a result of a blogger Paul Walsh. His blog was shut down shortly after his site was overrun by posts attacking the Chinese government.

In a democracy the free press are responsible for holding the government, corporations and anyone else with power accountable to the citizens to make sure they adhere to the rule of law In a dictatorship like China, where the government imposes its will on the people with the rule of fear the citizens have no one to turn to.

Citizen Journalists take on the government imposes on its people by taking up cameras and writing in blogs to bring there brutality to light.

To continue to push for free speech and democracy across the globe America should protest censorship wherever it arises.

Instead of standing by Taiwan and the Bush administration warned Taiwan nine times last year against voting for a referendum to apply to the United Nations as a country separate from China.

We must led the Taiwanese determine how they want to declare their independence from China.

If American does not speak out against China and support citizen Journalists in the effort to bring the truth to the world China's influence will only continue to grow. The ability of China's government to transform their economy, build enough power plants to keep it growing and take on epic architectural feats such as the Three Gorges Damn project have encourage other tyrants. China is inspiring new and old tyrants by providing them with a blueprint of how to impose your will on the people and grow your economy at the same time.

The best way that America can derail this blueprint is by supporting citizen journalists in China to shame the government by bring the truth to light. We have to show then the extreme poverty that still exists throughout the country. We have show how government officials use brutality to strike fear in the eyes of the citizens. Most of all we have to keep the memory of Wei Wenhau alive. No matter how hard the Chinese try to build a firewall to keep out the ideas of the free world the truth will always fine a way to slip through the cracks.

The best thing that we can do as Journalists and citizens is to keep talking about the injustices that continue to go on in China. As the Olympics approach us China will look for any way it can to drum up positive media stories to make it look like the government is more concerned with improving the lives of ordinary citizens then with maintains control. We must tune out the propaganda and bring the stories of citizen journalists to light so that the public can see both sides of the next superpower.