- Bookkeeping - 15th July 2026
- China crisis - 15th July 2026
- Burned out again - 14th July 2026
As our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry has written many times a free and independent media is essential in a society, although this does not exist in many states around the world, and it is now put centre stage by the shocking cover up of a terrible event in China, when a commenter declared: “I’ve searched the whole internet and I haven’t seen anything at all”.
Some things are non-negotiable – and a free media is one of them.
If you do not have this, the result is that awful incidents are not brought out into the open, and those with influence are not held to account by people like me.
Unfortunately exactly this has occurred in China where the media is state-controlled, and people are not told about episodes which are deemed unfavourable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The spotlight has been thrown on this fact by a terrible tragedy involving a construction vehicle at a market in Beijing, but we don’t know the details because it has been covered up, as officials are against anything coming out which is not ‘harmonious to society’.
When The Economist visited the site of the market at Fangshan, it was surrounded by dozens of police officers and local volunteers wearing the red armbands typical of CCP members.
A vehicle from China’s SWAT police was parked nearby, and when asked, a police officer refused to confirm that anything had happened at all.
But he did say that IF there had been an attack, mental illness would probably have been to blame, and the perpetrator would no doubt be in custody. because “China’s police are very effective”.
His colleagues then prevented questions being posed to local residents.
Still, veiled comments on social media suggest that some citizens are in the know anyway, despite a blanket ban on any any official journalistic reports.
“Wasn’t there something bigger that happened today?” asked one person on WeChat under a boring unrelated post by Fangshan’s police.
“I’ve searched the whole internet and I haven’t seen anything at all”, replied another commenter, who then posted a picture of a building vehicle.
Some 1.3 billion people use WeChat, not just for messaging but also for reading the news, booking travel, making medical appointments and paying bills.
But it is also an instrument for censorship and surveillance, restricting material critical of the CCP.
Police use it to snoop on dissidents, too.
Things don’t come out officially, as with information about the country’s persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and regrettably China (like many others) is not a signatory of the International Criminal Court (ICC) so it can do nothing about this appalling state of affairs, so the details of rape, torture as well as mass imprisonment had to be revealed by brave underground journalists.
China has tried to cover up all these abuses, like what happened at the market in Beijing.
It has also blanked out the prison camps on online maps only for diligent researchers to find them again by looking at the empty spaces.
According to Kenneth Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), China has become the greatest “threat to the global human-rights system”.
Perhaps comments like these are highlighted by what took place at Fangshan, when local people are suspicious, but we don’t know the truth because there is no free media like The Eye in China…
News, including stories like these by Phil, as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – cyber crime has been put centre stage by the Iranian war, as all parties try to destabilise the foundations of institutions, and this highlights once more how The Eye too have been targeted by hackers.
