U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Meets Chinese Bloggers Seeking Online Freedom

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry started his fifth trip to Asia last Wednesday. He was scheduled to visit South Korea, China and Indonesia. Before he left China he met with Chinese bloggers after his meeting with top Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Yang Jiechi, State Councilor. He also met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. His main mission was to ease the building tensions between China and its neighbors mainly due to territorial disputes and discuss the issues on North Korea’s nuclear weapons. He made time to meet with Chinese bloggers that wanted their country’s ruling party to ease its campaign for online interaction control. Their pursuit of online freedom is something Secretary Kerry wants to support.

Differing opinions

For the dissidents and rights groups, the crackdown on online postings is just a tool of the political party to curtail their freedom of expression as well as restrict criticisms aimed at the party.

For the government, they think it is necessary to install restrictions to maintain social stability, reasoning that there is some form of Internet regulations anywhere in the world.

Rare meeting

The meeting with the Chinese bloggers, scheduled by the American Embassy in Beijing, was a rare opportunity for them to meet with a U.S. Secretary of State. It came a day after Secretary Kerry’s meeting with the top Chinese officials.

Aside from discussing their main concern, the bloggers also discussed topics such as human rights, the (forthcoming) travel plans of President Obama, and the territorial dispute China is having with Japan during their 40-minute meeting.

Complaints

During the meeting, the Chinese bloggers appealed for Secretary Kerry to tear down the Internet firewall that has been imposed on them. The U.S. diplomat is already aware of the stepped up campaign on limiting Internet access to prevent political resistance. The leaders of the Communist party actually recommend Internet use, as long as it is for business and education. However, they have installed extensive filters and monitoring system to impede access to materials that the party think are obscene or subversive. Mr. Zhang Jialong, one of the bloggers and Tencent Finance reporter complained that U.S. companies are helping their country block access to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Microsoft has just this week denied that it is blocking access by its search engine Bing on some websites with the use of some search engine filters.

China and the U.S. had clashed over human rights and freedom of expression on many occasions. Secretary Kerry said that these issues are always put on the table during their meetings with the Chinese. He cautions, however, that the U.S, just like any other country, cannot dictate or lecture on how these issues should be handled. He did make it clear that the U.S. will continue to bring up these discussion whenever there is a chance for a meeting to find a solution favorable to everyone.

Photo credit: Taken by United States Department of State> under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.