Risks

A gang of toughs tackled Reuters’ Beijing senior correspondent Chris Buckley as he was leaving an interview in the late afternoon of September 10, 2007. The men, who refused to identify themselves, but whom Buckley suspects were plainclothes police, kicked and punched him and confiscated his notes, camera, and tape recorder. Buckley had strayed into one of China’s de facto forbidden zones—an illegal jail in the Beijing suburbs for “undesirables” from the rural countryside—and paid the price. The men detained Buckley for two hours, denied his requests to contact his employer and his embassy, and threatened him with further physical injury. Uniformed municipal police officers who later arrived on the scene facilitated Buckley’s release, but ignored the goons who had effectively kidnapped him and covered his upper body with bruises and abrasions. His notes, tape, and film were returned to him upon his release.

Welcome to the uglier side of foreign journalism in China, 2008 Summer Olympics host.

If you are one of the estimated 25,000 foreign journalists headed on a reporting assignment to China this summer, Buckley’s ordeal should serve as a reminder that this is no Athens, Sydney, or Atlanta, and that reporting in China has more than a few challenges. Beijing has become a sophisticated international city, but it is also the heart of a centralized, authoritarian political system that remains hostile to the concept of a free media. Reporters who try to cover issues beyond Olympics venues and expect the same reporting freedoms taken for granted in past host countries risk a rude awakening.

Despite—and in some ways because of—these obstacles, China remains a goldmine of critically important and exciting news stories which are well worth the effort of overcoming the government’s obstacles to independent reporting. In March 2008, Steve Chao and Sean Chang of Canada’s CTV News successfully evaded a dragnet of thousands of police and troops aimed to bar foreign media access to Tibetan communities in western China and returned to Beijing with unforgettable footage of dozens of Tibetan horsemen leading an attack on government offices in rural Gansu province. Those images, unmatched by CTV’s competitors, have become some of the most vivid in the public memory of the March 2008 Tibetan protests.