Journalists waiting outside the Great Hall of the People during the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing in March.Credit Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
[The New York Times]
By Andrew Jacobs
Conditions for foreign journalists working in China have gone from bad to worse over the past year, with the Chinese authorities increasingly seeking to influence coverage by intimidating reporters and their interview subjects, barring journalists from large portions of the country or by withholding visas and blocking the websites of overseas news outlets, according to a report issued on Friday by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.
The report, the result of a survey among the organization’s 243 members, paints a portrait of mounting pressure on foreign journalists as the ruling Communist Party seeks to aggressively limit negative coverage abroad and to punish news organizations and reporters who defy warnings to steer clear from so-called sensitive topics, such as the wealth accumulated by relatives of China’s top leaders.
The report noted that conditions had worsened significantly since 2008, when the Chinese government relaxed restrictions on foreign correspondents during the approach to the Beijing Olympics.
“China’s poor record on allowing open and unfettered reporting is in conflict with its desire to be seen as a modern society deserving of global respect,” the report said. “And it is in great contrast with the wide access Chinese journalists have enjoyed when reporting in many foreign countries.”
The report details increasing harassment of foreign journalists by public security personnel, with two-thirds of respondents reporting interference or physical violence in the field. Last spring, for example, several photographers and television crew members were injured or had equipment damaged as they tried to cover the Beijing trial of the rights activist Xu Zhiyong.
In some instances, the police have sought to intimidate reporters by visiting their homes and bureaus. In the weeks before the 25th anniversary of the June 4 military crackdown on student protests in Tiananmen Square, several reporters were summoned to the offices of the Beijing Public Security Bureau and warned against covering the occasion.
The authorities have also taken aim at Chinese citizens working for foreign news bureaus. Half of all respondents who employ Chinese news assistants said they had been threatened or harassed by the authorities. In some instances, national security agents have pressed interns working at American news outlets to act as spies, and when they refused, pressured them into quitting.
The report, framed as a position paper, included more than two dozen recommendations to the Chinese government for improving working conditions among overseas journalists. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in the past it has warned the association against making public cases of harassment and intimidation among its membership.
Among those surveyed, 99 percent said reporting conditions in China had failed to meet international standards and 80 percent said conditions had deteriorated or remained unchanged, a 10 percentage point increase from 2013.
“For the last three or four years it has been getting harder for foreign journalists to do their jobs, either because they’re simply not allowed into the country through denial of visas, or because information is increasingly withheld from foreign reporters,” said Peter Ford, president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.
The withholding of visas remains an issue for The New York Times and Bloomberg News following articles that explored the finances of the relatives of China’s leadership. Since October 2012, after The Times published an investigation into the wealth amassed by relatives of Wen Jiabao, the former premier, the Chinese authorities have declined to issue resident journalist visas for new Times reporters. In recent months, officials have also withheld temporary visas for Times journalists based outside China seeking to conduct interviews or attend conferences in the country.
The websites of both The Times and Bloomberg remain blocked in China, and The Wall Street Journal’s website has been blocked since late May.
A number of other American news organizations have been thwarted in their effort to establish bureaus here. According to the report, PBS NewsHour, Huffington Post and the online news organization GlobalPost have been denied licenses to set up offices in China. A reporter for Huffington Post living in Beijing has been granted a six-month temporary journalist’s visa rather than a longer-term journalist’s residency visa.
Large portions of the country remain off-limits to foreign correspondents. In addition to the restricted access to Tibet, the government has made it increasingly difficult for reporters to conduct interviews in the far western region of Xinjiang, home to China’s Uighur minority, as well as to heavily Tibetan areas of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces. The report described such restrictions as “widespread, arbitrary and unexplained” by the authorities.
“Journalists seeking to report in Xinjiang have routinely been turned back by checkpoint police and other authorities telling them that they are forbidden to be there,” the report said.
Print
Email