- Introduction
- I. Risks and Rights
- II. Outside the Arena
- III. Security, Surveillance, and Safety
- IV. Protecting Your Chinese Contacts
- V. The Great Firewall
- VI. Practical Information
- Map of China with 2008 Olympic Sites
- Download PDF / English
- Download PDF / French
- Download PDF / German
- Download PDF / Japanese
- Download PDF / Spanish
Shielding your Chinese sources, news assistants, and translators
Many journalists arriving in China to cover the Beijing Games may be concerned about getting into trouble with the Chinese authorities over their reporting. The biggest risk is not to you or your news outlet, but rather to the Chinese people with whom you come into contact. An unintended consequence of the temporary Olympic press regulations is that, in an effort to appear cooperative with foreign journalists, government officials, police, and plainclothes thugs may place greater pressure on reporters’ Chinese translators or assistants in order to halt sensitive stories’ coming to fruition.
Foreign correspondents need “fixers,” researchers, translators, and even drivers for logistical assistance, setting up interviews, translation and interpretation, and help evaluating the relative wisdom and risk of pursuing particular topics or interview subjects at a particular time. Such people are uniquely vulnerable to reprisals from official and non-official agents. Because their work involves the pursuit of stories that are often classified as taboo for domestic journalists, work on those topics attracts the interest of state security officials who regularly call them in to question them or their employers.
A potent lesson of the dangers faced by Chinese assistants to foreign correspondents is the case of Zhao Yan, a researcher for The New York Times in Beijing who served a three-year prison sentence after being convicted of fraud, a charge he always denied. His case was marred by multiple violations of due process and there are concerns that his conviction was politically motivated.
A veteran Beijing-based foreign correspondent told Human Rights Watch:
The main issue isn’t the [foreign] reporters, but what happens to the [local] people you talk to. The [temporary] rules give us much greater latitude to seek information and to oppose those who try to oppose our reporting, but how does that mesh with local rules in which people can be intimidated and detained for contact with western media?
