RUTHFULLY YOURS

China has just sentenced 71-year-old ace journalist Gao Yu to seven years in prison on charges of “leaking state secrets overseas ^[1].” And what are those secrets she is accused of leaking? They center on renewed efforts by the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping to suppress free speech.

We have here a sort of infinite regress of absurdities. ^[1] If China’s authorities consider it a state secret that their policies are to smother free speech and punish dissent, then they themselves are broadcasting this secret by jailing a journalist for exposing it. Presumably, any Chinese journalist who might dare to delve into this could be accused of exposing the exposure of this secret — which is actually no secret at all.

But that’s the very point: To shut up other Chinese journalists, and chill discussion more broadly among those who cover China. Censorship is easier to practice when people are afraid even to suggest that it exists.

According to China’s Xinhua state news agency ^[2], Gao Yu was arrested in May 2014 on suspicion of “illegally obtaining a highly confidential document and sending an electronic copy of it to an overseas website in June last year.” Chinese authorities have not confirmed what document this was. But the Wall Street Journal reports ^[3] that according to Gao’s  lawyer, Mo Shaoping, it was an internal Communist Party directive known as “Document No. 9,” which “identified ideological trends that the party should target.” Accounts from other sources, including Radio Free Asia, the BBC and the Committee to Protect Journalists, also point to Document No. 9, which the BBC describes ^[4] as calling for “aggressive restrictions on democracy, civil society and the press.”

As the Wall Street Journal further reports: “Ms. Gao had admitted to the crime and apologized in a confession aired on state television in May, but she later retracted her confession, saying it had been made under duress after police detained her son.”

This terrible scene gets worse. According to the same Journal dispatch, Gao — a veteran dissident of the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, who spent years in jail in the 1990s for activities that displeased the Party — is one of three elderly dissidents prosecuted amid “a sustained crackdown on criticism and independent political activity in which dozens of activists, lawyers, scholars and others have been detained or jailed, in some cases for unusually long periods.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports ^[5]that in 2008 China had 24 journalists in prison. Today it has 44. This is a testament to two phenomena: a resurgent campaign of repression by China’s ruling Communist Party, and, beneath that boot, the courage and profound desire among China’s people for something better. It is the latter that China’s regime is actually trying to keep secret.