democracy and media

not that i ever normally read CNN, but I did once since they did some 'special' on China (actually, just 3 or 4 articles!!) and this was interesting: here

It talks about a conference on democracy that was being co-held between a Chinese and American University, that was cancelled since it was near the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square masacre on June 4th. Once again it shows the sensitivity of the governement to the remote possibilities that something might happen, and I believe this paranoia (similar to the control exerted over the media when Zhao Ziyang died in January) is too extreme, and that the government should slowly open up the media rather than wait till some unfortunate moment when something big actually happens. But just a personal view, of course!

The other thing to note is the academic relevance. Since there is a general (but very slow) trend in China for people to be more daring (businesses, journalists, academics) in order to be 'the first' (to break the story, sell a product, write a paper etc) thus to create fame and/or money for themselves (a natural development I think). Thus there seems to be more people saying things critical of the government than you would normally expect (although it is normally carefully worded), and the government rightly encourages this (as a verison of democracy) since feedback is valuable to help the government improve.

However might there be a time when some people overstep the line? I recently read about a professor in Peking University who was fired/retired because of a posting on an internal online bulletin board. Remember, it is the communist party who run the Universities, not the professors or principals. Anyway, we'll see how it develops!

Its great to know that China thought about holding such a conference in the first place, and I know that it is sllwly encouraging democracy in certain levels of elections etc, and they are quite democratic (how democractic are most of those in the 'west', anyway?); although there is still the "1 party" issue. Anyway, there are elections of a kind within the party, and elections in localities.

I am not an expert on this at all, so I am just trying to identify some trends rather than specifics (which may be wrong), so apologies....and as always, I may be completely wrong!