In the late 1990s, the staff at the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York took note of an exciting new trend in China. With traditional Chinese media under tight state censorship, people with something critical to say about their government had seized on the Internet as a new platform to publish their views. Their actions were not unlike the samizdat dissidents of the Soviet era or the poster-makers of Beijing University during the 1989 student uprising. But now, with the Internet, Chinese writers had the potential to reach a global audience.

In 1999, China arrested six people on charges of using the Internet to spread “anti-government” or “subversive” messages. I was the executive director of CPJ at the time, and we had to decide whether to take up their cases. None was a journalist in any traditional sense; reporting wasn’t their daily job and they didn’t write for established news organizations. But they were, we reasoned, acting journalistically. They disseminated news, information, and opinion. We took up the cases.

In the years since, CPJ has defended writers in Cuba, Iran, Malaysia, and elsewhere—some traditional journalists, some not—who used the Internet to get around official censorship. In CPJ’s view, these were entrepreneurial spirits using technology to battle enemies of press freedom. The many American journalists who supported CPJ’s global work readily agreed. 

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