Forbidden zones


"The Chinese are not prepared for the kind of press freedom that happens at every Olympics and produces insult and bad feelings. Everything that gets written will be instantly fed back to the students and the Internet community in Beijing. I'm at least as worried about student protests over these perceived insults against China as I am about anything the state is going to do."

— John MacAloon, an Olympic historian at the University of Chicago, quoted by the Associated Press on April 29, 2008, on the occasion of the 100-day countdown to the Beijing Games

Confidence in the Chinese government’s commitment to its own Olympics-related temporary regulations on media freedom for foreign correspondents declined in March 2008, at the onset of the crackdown on unrest in Tibet and neighboring provinces. Four days after peaceful demonstrations turned violent on March 14 in Lhasa, the Chinese government had systematically sealed off Tibet and Tibetan areas of Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai, and Yunnan provinces to foreign journalists. On those provinces’ major roads leading to Tibetan communities which had reportedly been the scene of protests and riots, police converted toll booths into roadblocks expressly designed to detain and then turn back foreign correspondents.

The Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, to the northwest of Tibet, is another sensitive zone where the freedom to report is severely curtailed. In a New York Times column dated May 29, 2008, Nicholas Kristof describes what happened when he recently flew to the oasis city of Kashgar in Xinjiang to investigate the Chinese government’s allegations that Muslim terrorists based in the region are planning to disrupt the Olympics: “I had been in Kashgar just a few hours when my videographer, who is ethnically Chinese, called to say that two plainclothes officials were interrogating him. They asked him not to tell me since American journalists tend to be touchy about such things.”

Foreign journalists who look to the IOC to enforce Beijing’s Olympics-related media freedom commitments will likely be disappointed. To date the IOC has ignored the scores of reported violations meticulously documented and published by the media as well as the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and other groups. Instead, Anthony Edgar, the IOC’s head of media operations, said in Beijing in September 2007: “The Chinese government committed itself a long time ago to media working in China as freely as in other countries, in accordance with IOC and international practices, [and] I think they are working well at the moment.”

That is not the reality. Journalists coming to cover the Beijing Olympics in August should use this guide as a self-defense manual designed to help you protect yourself, your sources, and your local staff while covering the Olympics and wider social, economic, cultural, and political stories of interest—some of the most compelling stories in the world today.