Your Chinese sources and staff are particularly at risk

The freedoms granted to foreign journalists in the new regulations do not extend to local sources and staff of foreign journalists, Chinese assistants, translators, “fixers,” and researchers. These persons are increasingly the target of intimidation by government officials, security forces, and plainclothes officials when foreign correspondents put up a fight over their reporting rights. The local source of a foreign journalist covering a story on pollution in western China in February was later hounded by police, who warned him that he would face charges of “subversion” if he spoke to foreign journalists again. Meanwhile, the assistant of a Beijing-based foreign correspondent who has extensively covered Chinese dissidents has come under the intensive scrutiny of two security agencies whose intimidation tactics have included harassment of the assistant’s parents and former school teachers.