Reflections | China has always tightly controlled news and information, with gossip harshly punished

On November 9, a parish priest was stabbed with a knife as he presided over mass at a Catholic church in Singapore. While the priest survived, and the attacker was subdued at the scene and subsequently handed over to the police, the vicious act shocked the city state, which is unaccustomed to such high-profile acts of violence. What came next was a masterclass in information management. Knowing the futility of imposing a blanket ban on people sharing the incident on social media, and that a news vacuum invites speculation that may give rise to even worse outcomes, Singaporean authorities chose the strategy of pre-empting would-be conspiracy theories by launching a media blitz on the known facts of the case. Speed was imperative. Within hours after the attack, we were told that the attacker was “believed to have acted alone” and the police did not suspect that it was an act of terrorism. The police also revealed that the Sinhalese Singaporean perpetrator had “past antecedents for serious hurt and misuse of drugs offences”. Most significantly, the attacker was identified as a Christian. The swiftness with which these facts were made known went a long way in assuring the public that what had just happened was not a terrorist attack and that foreigners were not involved. Crucially for Singapore, it nipped in the bud any speculation that the incident involved an adherent of one religion attacking a spiritual leader of another faith. There is also something to be said for the maturity and rationality of the average media consumer in Singapore, which prevented misinformation, and disinformation, from taking root, with potentially dire consequences. The fatal stabbing of three children in Southport, England in July triggered rumours that the attacker was a Muslim immigrant or asylum seeker. The days that followed saw some of the most violent riots in recent times across the United Kingdom. More recently in the United States, millions of Americans believed Haitian immigrants in the state of Ohio were eating people’s pets, even after the state governor himself dismissed the xenophobic rumours as falsehoods. Information and news were tightly controlled in imperial China, with political developments, government directives, manpower movements and national data disseminated in a top-down manner. The imperial court regularly published gazettes containing such information and distributed them across the empire, down to individual villages and hamlets. After the invention of movable type printing in 1040, there were privately printed bulletins that reported news from unofficial sources and court gossip. Most of the time, these were frowned upon by the authorities or outright illegal. During the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), publishers of these bulletins were fined a substantial sum of money. By the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the government allowed some of these private purveyors of news to operate, with restrictions. News considered out of bounds included natural disasters and domestic rebellions. During the reign of the Qing dynasty’s Yongzheng Emperor (1722-1735), a private bulletin in Beijing reported that the emperor enjoyed himself in the Old Summer Palace during the Dragon Boat Festival. Yongzheng had earlier announced that the palace would not be celebrating the festival that year, so the report made the emperor look bad. The editors and writers responsible were put to death. The imperial court continued to publish and distribute government gazettes right up to the end of the Qing dynasty. It was one such gazette that informed countless intellectuals across China about the abolition of the centuries-old imperial examination system in 1905. One can imagine the shock, disappointment and tears that accompanied this piece of news. Modern Chinese language newspapers were founded in China in the early 20th century and continue to thrive. However, like everywhere else in the world, social media is fast replacing newspapers and other traditional media as the main source of news, for the simple reason that most people today have the attention span of a gnat.

Reflections | China has always tightly controlled news and information, with gossip harshly punished

The Yongzheng Emperor even put to death editors and writers linked to a report he had celebrated a festival that he had said he would not