(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-11-08 14:38

Apart from legal preparations, local governments are also taking "encouraging" steps in reducing media restrictions.

Starting this month, the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, which straddles the Yangtze River, instituted regular monthly press conferences for domestic and foreign media. Local officials pledged not to restrict media reporting by "influencing, interfering or handing out pre-meditated press releases."

Chongqing is the second provincial-level municipality to adopt this form of press conference. China's business hub, Shanghai, introduced a similar scheme in June 2003.

Media freedom: A stopgap?

Despite China's progress toward greater media freedom, there has been some concern that any relaxation would be temporary.

"I have heard such worries, but the trend of opening up is irreversible," Prof. Yu said.

"The revision of the old rules is part of China's commitment to the IOC (International Olympic Committee), but it's also a commitment to the Chinese people and media," he said.

"There might be setbacks," he said, but China would make steady progress toward greater openness.

The view that negative reports would have negative results was still held in some quarters, but from a sociological point of view, more information would bring understanding, trust, and even intimacy, while the absence of information would mean the opposite, Yu argued.

"Information black-outs have been blamed for making China seem like a distant and mysterious state, and that just can't happen in the future," he said.

The planned stock market listings of Chinese media groups, mostly state-owned, would also mean more media freedom, Yu added.

Zhan Jiang, director of the School of Journalism and Communication, China Youth University For Political Sciences, said that "research has shown that international factors accounted for increasing China's GDP growth, and blocking information flows is at odds with the degree of openness in the Chinese economy and logistics."

"Relaxed rules help institutionalize transparency and accountability. We hope the relaxation will persist beyond the Olympics, and we look forward to even more relaxation in the near future," FlorCruz said.

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