New regulations

Despite rhetoric from the Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about Beijing’s readiness to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese government is not living up to its promises to provide international standards of media freedom. In 2001, the Chinese government made media freedom a centerpiece of its bid for the 2008 Olympics. At that time, Wang Wei, secretary-general of the Beijing Olympic Games Bid Committee, promised international media “complete freedom to report when they come to China” for the 2008 Olympic Games. Numerous Chinese officials at all levels of government have since repeated these promises. And the Chinese government partly followed through on that pledge by rolling out temporary regulations on media freedom for foreign journalists that are in effect from January 2007 to October 2008.

The temporary rules in principle allow these reporters to talk to any consenting interviewee and travel anywhere they want in China, liberating them from longstanding regulatory handcuffs. But the Chinese government has failed to ensure the proper implementation of the rules. The result: foreign journalists continue to be routinely harassed, detained, and intimidated in the course of their work in China. Journalists’ early praise for access to previously off-limits dissidents, brokered by the temporary rules, has waned as that access has steadily narrowed over the past year.

As David Barboza, Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times put it: “This is just the way the business is [in China]—if you go to some area where they are nervous about foreign journalists, you will be harassed and detained.” Barboza would know. In June 2007, staff at a factory in Dongguan, Guangdong province, detained Barboza, his Chinese assistant, and a photographer for more than 10 hours while the team was working on a story about toxic lead paint discovered in the factory’s US exports. Local police were unwilling or unable to help extricate the three men from illegal detention. Barboza eventually secured their release by writing a short statement explaining the reason for their visit to the factory and acknowledging he had not asked for permission to take photographs.

A team of four journalists with Germany’s ARD TV was pelted with stones by plainclothes thugs on January 24, 2008, while attempting to meet with Yuan Weijing, wife of imprisoned human rights defender Chen Guangcheng. Foreign journalists tell Human Rights Watch that they are now routinely denied access to Zeng Jinyan, wife of imprisoned human rights activist Hu Jia, by plainclothes officers who seal the entrance to her apartment block with police tape whenever journalists approach.

The Chinese government dismisses protests from journalists about violations of the temporary regulations as inevitable bureaucratic glitches in a vast, politically decentralized country. Yet over the past year, Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials have directly engaged in intimidation by verbally warning numerous foreign journalists against reporting on officially “sensitive” topics such as discrimination against ethnic minorities. More disturbingly, the Foreign Ministry has declined Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) requests to investigate death threats made against more than 10 foreign journalists in the wake of rioting in Lhasa, Tibet, in mid-March. Three of those 10 had participated in a Foreign Ministry-organized visit to Lhasa at the end of March, and some of their personal and contact information was subsequently leaked onto domestic websites, prompting the threats against both the journalists and their families. The Foreign Ministry has informed the FCCC that such a probe—and by extension, the physical safety of foreign journalists—is not its responsibility.

The June-July issue of the American Journalism Review described the harassment faced by one bureau chief: “Early in April, after returning from a government-chaperoned reporting trip to the aftermath of demonstrations in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Associated Press Beijing Bureau Chief Charles Hutzler started getting harassing calls on his mobile phone. For five or six days, 20 to 30 calls rolled in every hour (except during lunch and dinner and late at night), with a nearly equal number of text messages. Most passed on petty insults and patriotic curses; some threatened to kill him.”