Contact is taking a holiday!

By MICHAEL FORSYTHE DEC. 22, 2015 / The New York Times

HONG KONG — A French journalist says she is facing expulsion from China after she wrote an article critical of the country’s treatment of its Uighur minority, which set off stinging criticism in the state-controlled press, a public rebuke from a government spokeswoman and a torrent of online invective.

The journalist, Ursula Gauthier, a Beijing-based reporter for the newsmagazine L’Obs, must leave China before Jan. 1 unless her press credentials are renewed, usually a routine process taking place in November and early December for the hundreds of foreign correspondents based in China. As of Tuesday, Ms. Gauthier said in an interview, she had received no notice from the Foreign Ministry that she would be allowed to stay, nor any similar indication from French diplomats, who have raised her case with Chinese officials.

Should Ms. Gauthier be forced to leave, she would be the first foreign correspondent expelled from China since Melissa Chan of Al Jazeera’s English-language service left in 2012 after reporting on issues such as forced land seizures and illegal detention centers, also known as “black jails.”

Ursula Gauthier Credit L’Obs, via Associated Press

The government has also punished news organizations that report on the wealth accumulated by the families of Chinese leaders by withholding credentials from new journalists they assign to China. New reporters hired by The New York Times were forced to leave Beijing in 2012 and 2014 after the government declined to grant them visas.

In late 2013, the government also delayed the renewal of credentials for about two dozen journalists with The Times and Bloomberg News but issued the papers in the final days of the year. It may do the same for Ms. Gauthier, who has been a correspondent in Beijing since 2009.

Ms. Gauthier enraged the government with her biting essay, published Nov. 18 in the days after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris left 130 people dead. She opened her piece discussing the outpouring of sympathy for the victims by Chinese people and the love they had expressed for Paris. Then she pivoted to the Chinese government’s attempt to link the Paris attacks with its own efforts to combat the violence in Xinjiang.

“Beautiful solidarity, but not entirely free of ulterior motives,” she wrote.

In the days after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, China’s government for the first time publicized a deadly Sept. 18 attack at a Xinjiang coal mine in which dozens of miners were alleged to have been stabbed to death by a group of Uighur militants. China’s state-run television was filled with images of Chinese police officers trekking through the rugged mountains in search of the suspects, about 28 of whom were reported killed in the manhunt.

While China considered the killings an act of terrorism, Ms. Gauthier said what happened in Xinjiang had “nothing in common” with the Paris attacks, stating that violence by the Uighurs was caused by China’s own policies toward the ethnic minority. “Pushed to the limit, a small group of Uighurs armed with cleavers set upon a coal mine and its Han Chinese workers, probably in revenge for an abuse, an injustice or an expropriation,” she wrote.

Ms. Gauthier’s essay was the subject of editorials in the state-owned Global Times and China Daily, which called her argument “ridiculous and absurd.” The Global Times opened its article up for comment, which quickly filled with coarse sexual remarks and threats against her, though some readers questioned why Ms. Gauthier’s original article was not available for China’s Internet users to read and judge for themselves.

On. Dec. 2, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, speaking to reporters in Beijing, criticized Ms. Gauthier by name.

“We cannot understand why other countries’ counterterrorism actions are justified but China’s counterterrorism actions are so-called repression of ethnic groups,” Ms. Hua said in response to a question from China Daily. “The logic is ridiculous and is out of political prejudice and double standards.”

The Foreign Ministry has not commented on whether or not it would renew Ms. Gauthier’s visa and did not respond to faxed questions sent on Tuesday.

Ms. Gauthier said that she had been called into the ministry three times and asked to apologize and admit to errors in her article. She said that she stood by her story: “I told them I would not change a word.”

France’s ambassador to China, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, met with Chinese diplomats this month and, after stating that both countries were victims of terrorism — pointing out recent deaths of Chinese citizens in the Middle East and Africa — said he hoped China would renew Ms. Gauthier’s press credentials, a spokeswoman for the French Embassy said. The spokeswoman would not comment on the Chinese side’s response.

Bob Dietz, the Asia program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York, said the reaction to Ms. Gauthier’s article illustrated how the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping has become increasingly intolerant of any criticism of its treatment of ethnic minorities.

“The barrage of vindictive intimidation launched against Gauthier by the government is an indicator of just how sensitive the issue of China’s internal problems with the Uighur and Tibetan issues, too, have become,” Mr. Dietz said in an emailed statement. “And it is also an indicator of the Xi government’s approach to the role of media in China — simply nothing beyond the party’s line on sensitive issues will be tolerated.”