By Brian Spegele
BEIJING--As pro-democracy demonstrations surged in Hong Kong
this week, Chinese state media have switched gears, first giving
little coverage to the protests and then loudly condemning them as
endangering Hong Kong's prosperity while carefully skipping over
their cause.
On Saturday, for the third day running, a commentary on the
front page of the Communist Party's flagship People's Daily
newspaper blasted the demonstrations as illegal and participants as
radicals looking to undermine Hong Kong's strong rule-of-law
traditions. Reports on state television have focused on disruptions
to daily life and the economy, featuring shopkeepers complaining
about a drop in business.
While the government's messaging has been clear, what the
protesters are fighting for has been intentionally obscured.
Largely absent from much of the coverage are images of protests.
Chinese social media sites and instant-messaging applications
appear to be censoring Hong Kong-related images. Instagram, the
photo-sharing app owned by Facebook Inc., has also experienced some
outages in the mainland this week. Facebook has said it is looking
into the issue.
"As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words," said
Wenshan Jia, a communications professor at California's Chapman
University. "Such images would have reminded the viewers of the
student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago."
Chinese inside the mainland who circumvented Internet filters to
sample wider coverage found a different story from the chaos warned
by Chinese papers. The tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents,
many of them students, clogged roadways in several parts of the
city but took care, many noted, to clean up after themselves,
separating plastic bottles for recycling. One image circulating
online this week showed a demonstrator holding an umbrella for a
police officer in a torrential downpour.
A concern for Chinese leaders is that rights activists inside
mainland China or the legions of government petitioners would seize
on the Hong Kong protests and seek to emulate them, said Mr.
Jia.
"Broadcasting the real images of such protests would implicitly
endorse such protests, undoing the purpose of such reporting," he
said.
The roots of the protests reflect growing anger over the
concentration of political and economic power in the hands of
relatively few Hong Kong individuals with close ties to Beijing,
said Richard Bush, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
the Washington think tank. While part of the Chinese government's
message is that unspecified foreign forces are influencing the
protests, the street gatherings' animating force is a sense of
underrepresentation in business and politics among many Hong Kong
residents, Mr. Bush wrote on the Brookings Institution's
website.
Some protest images have been seized upon by state media,
particularly those that reinforce the idea that Hong Kong could
spiral into chaos. After Hong Kong police clashed with protesters
and launched tear gas to disperse crowds on Sept. 28, the Global
Times, a widely circulated tabloid, published a photo on the front
page of its Chinese edition showing police with riot shields
forcing back demonstrators.
Such protest images have been tightly controlled. On China's
Baidu search engine, an image search for both "occupy central,"
--as the protest movement is widely known--and "Hong Kong" didn't
return pictures of the this week's demonstrations. Searching for
"occupy central" on Sina Corp.'s Weibo microblogging service
returned an error message that results couldn't be displayed
because of Chinese laws and regulations.
Saturday's People's Daily commentary said it was a daydream to
think the demonstrations would spread to the mainland as some
sought a Chinese "color revolution," a reference to the upheavals
that brought democracies to the former Soviet states of Ukraine and
Georgia.
"Democratic society requires respect for minority opinions, but
this absolutely does not mean a minority of people can adopt
illegal behavior, " the Saturday commentary read.
The latest commentary didn't mention running clashes which broke
out Friday in Hong Kong's district of Mong Kok after angry
crowds--some later described as being underworld gang
members--descended on the demonstrators. The commentary, like
earlier ones, expressed support for Hong Kong police, saying their
handling of the demonstrations had been beyond reproach.
A brief article on the website of the official Xinhua News
Agency Friday recounted the Mong Kok incident. It quoted Hong Kong
authorities imploring remaining demonstrators to disperse.
Write to Brian Spegele at brian.spegele@wsj.com
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