China, Tear Down That Great Censorship Wall

As an estimated 30,000 foreign journalists descend on Beijing to cover the 2008 Olympic Games, the world's spotlight will shine not only on the Games themselves but on China's restrictive stance toward media access. The Chinese government, reverting to form after its clash with the media over the March uprisings in Tibet, continues to clamp down on foreign and Chinese journalists as the opening of the Games approaches.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has catalogued anecdotal reports by foreign reporters ranging from minor obstructions of freedom of the press to outright harassment of individual reporters to detainment of individual reporters. The Committee to Protect Journalists has heard about the crucial threshold issue of delays in even obtaining visas. HRW reports cases in which China's foreign affairs ministry threatened the visa status of foreign reporters whose stories it considered inappropriate.

USA Today sports and political reporter Janice Lloyd, a veteran of nine Olympics, recounted her own incident last April when covering the run-up to the Games. Hoping to write stories about China's new Olympic training center and the Chinese athletes, in order to "give the U.S. insights into their drive to succeed," Lloyd was thwarted at every turn. Multiple attempts to contact the head of Beijing's Olympic organizing committee and other Chinese Olympics officials went bluntly unanswered, and Lloyd, unable to write the stories she envisioned, instead covered the Olympic torch relay through Paris and London from her post in Beijing.

The irony of being in Beijing and not being able to report on Beijing was not lost on Lloyd. But, adding insult to irony, Lloyd found a woman rummaging through personal folders at her desk when she returned to her Beijing hotel. Lloyd asked the woman what she was doing. The woman said she was restocking the minibar, but there was no rolling cart in sight. Also, the woman was dressed in business attire. Lloyd held the door open, and the woman left. "I hope you're enjoying your stay here," she said to Lloyd, smiling smugly.

On returning to the States, Lloyd talked with an FBI agent who told her the "housekeeping" woman had probably been in Lloyd's room every day and that her movements were likely being watched. The surveillance goals were twofold: monitoring and intimidation. But things could have been worse. Lloyd's colleague, Calum MacLeod, one of the journalists allowed by the Chinese government into Tibet last spring, wrote a USA Today cover story about the uprisings. According to Lloyd, the backlash was immediate. MacLeod received 200 death threats on his cell phone.

As a fan of the Olympics who recalls such historic moments as Bruce Jenner winning the decathlon or Nadia Comeneci winning a perfect 10 in gymnastics, I believe the world should not settle for only half of the Olympic experience, for a stunted and sanitized event. Stories such as those Janice Lloyd hoped to write would have scored positive points for Chinese Olympic organizers. By obstructing and harassing reporters, China not only risks missing out on opportunities for compelling news footage, but it increases the likelihood of making censorship the hot story of the 2008 Olympics.

Instead of flexing its command and control muscles, China should honor temporary regulations issued in December 2006 that allow foreign journalists to interview anyone who consents to be interviewed. China arguably should make these regulations permanent, broaden them to include Chinese journalists and the assistants and fixers who will work with foreign journalists during the Games, and dismantle the elaborate government apparatus that keeps journalists from reporting freely.

Such an apparatus only obstructs China's hope of taking the world stage as an ascending and legitimate power. According to BBC correspondent Adam Brookes, who covered China for several years between 1995 and 2003, the Chinese government has customarily relied on media control as a "central lever." Hotels report foreign press visitors to local authorities to help track their movements. A repressive administrative penalties system keeps Chinese journalists fearful of the fateful "knock on the door in the middle of the night" that leads to solitary confinement or re-education labor camps. Speaking of the treatment of Chinese journalists, Brookes told me, "We're not just talking media censorship, but, on occasion, very serious brutality and intimidation of the press. It's a nasty business."

It is indeed. China is the world's largest jailer of journalists, with 26 Chinese journalists currently imprisoned. And these types of coercion and their chilling effects are not recent inventions. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China reports more than 260 cases of reporting interference since January 1, 2007, including cases involving violence, detention, harassment, being questioned in an intimidating manner and being followed.

In reports issued in 2007 and 2008, Human Rights Watch catalogues incidents described by foreign journalists, including, disturbingly, intimidation of foreign reporters by plainclothes thugs who appear to be working in tandem with government and police officials. A photographer based in Beijing described being followed by suspected plainclothes policemen in black sedans during a reporting trip in Henan province. She was harassed by the men, who refused to identify themselves. That same day the photographer and her colleague were briefly detained by the police. A European television journalist was "detained and beaten by plainclothes thugs while doing a story on civil unrest in Shengyou village in Hebei province," according to HRW. A local official told the reporter she had misinterpreted China's temporary regulations on media access, and the incident ended with the reporter's interview footage being erased.

In another case, a foreign television correspondent told HRW that officials with China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs threatened to deny accreditation for the Olympics to the broadcaster's foreign-based staff after the correspondent "publicly complained about being harassed and detained by government officials in Anbai province," according to HRW. Foreign affairs ministry officials informed one of the producers with the correspondent's bureau that approval of Olympics accreditations for the broadcaster's foreign-based staff was "in jeopardy unless the correspondent issued a public apology or correction," which the correspondent refused to do.

Reports of journalistic "lockdown," do not augur well for the Games. Still, the Chinese government does pay close attention to Western media coverage. Certain media-literate officials may recognize that if China is to become a leader in the world community, it must stop harassing and imprisoning journalists. Accordingly, now is the time for the world community to urge China to adopt more open policies toward the press. The Games are not simply a good place to begin. The Games are the greatest stage on the planet. And the show can be either a Hitlerian scrap of propaganda or a new Olympian step forward.

Read more HuffPost coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

Sally Jean Kearney, a senior writer-editor with the FDIC and a former Senate staff writer, is currently a student in Georgetown University's Master of Professional Studies in Journalism Program.

Comments

[zhaoeu]

The west is losing a great opportunity to get to know modern China by religiously following the "reporter guidelines" which were meant to be a joke, but turns out to be very true. Courtesy of Times' China Blog.

http://time-blog.com/china_blog/2008/07/a_reporters_guide_to_covering.html


Reporter Guidelines for Covering the Beijing Olympics

4) Now for reportage. After saying the nice things about the new buildings, get your translator to find a Beijing yam seller whose slum was knocked down to make way for the Olympic badminton hall. Do a few paras on him, and how all the money thrown at the Games is not helping the poor, and how terrible the huge income gap is. Make sure you write at least three times as much about the yam seller whose slum was pulled down as you do about all the new apartments, new metro lines, the growth in car ownership, the expanding health insurance and all the other good news about China that nobody in the west really wants to know about.

[sassafra]

if western journalists had the stones to either refuse to put up with china's nonsense and threaten to leave en masse or made the only story the censorship and intimidation until it stopped, it would stop.
sadly, they, like the ioc, have no stones.
i will not watch china's 1936 mark II olynpiad.

[InofTouch]

geez...this sound like a script made for hollywood but this based on true events.

[Visceral]

The Chinese government is acting as if interviewed Chinese don't know they'll be arrested, imprisoned, and tortured if they say anything on record that the government doesn't like.

[edtastic]

The intimidation is definitely unpleasant but I think the treatment of Palestinian Journalist who was strip, sexually assaulted, physically abused, and taunted with racial slurs by the Israeli Defense Force was probably worse than anything China did. I lived in China for a long time. I felt safer there than I did in USA after 9/11 because the American police state was in full effect. My friend had guns pulled on him in the airport because he left his laptop plugged in a wall to charge.

Your anecdotal stories about the oppressive government of China is highly subjective. The operating norm is only bad news about China is considered news worthy. The truth of China gets buried and by now half of America probably hates China because of Western Media. There is definitely something suspicious. Perhaps they feel threatened by China's growing dominance on the world stage and seek to restrain them.

China is not going to become America nor should it. Journalist need to get over themselves and learn they are just people, who deserve little more respect than the companies they work for. After guiding American hearts and minds into supporting a war I don't thing these journalist are to be trusted or their Corporations. China can do what it needs to do, to keep the 1.3 billion people moving foward, because we know the Western Media can care less what happens to them.

[FirstShirt]

Well, Ed, it is a well known fact that police states are more secure. Funny about that. And, after 911 any idiot who wanted to test our porous security system was lucky the guns were just drawn. If you can't see the difference between the chinese system and the american system you are obviously not objective.

[edtastic]

Yeah the superficial demonstrations of force like guys in the airport with M-16's did not make me feel safe, it made me feel like it was more likely than usual law enforcement would do something stupid. I don't trust my government because it has proven itself untrustworthy. I don't trust American Journalism because it has proven itself untrustworthy. Neither our government nor our media seems to work in the interest of the people in fairly obvious examples of apathy and indifference. The media seems to hype fears and the need for more police, jails and security. The government promotes extending its powers to spy, torture, taser, shoot to kill, and every other form of absolute power it can impose on the American people.

Yeah these days China feels a lot safer than America, also nice being around people that don't have guns. Nice being around people don't think everyone is a potential terrorist. Americans are scared of everything and everybody, dumping their freedoms like they are going out of style. We can just wait for the never ending laws to regulate our every behavior under the infallible shield of democracy, it also helps cover up our insane military spending while our schools fail. USA got serious problems it needs to learn from China more than it needs to export its self destructive attitudes.

[LeonBNJ]

I think the NBC's and any others covering the Olympics should have a crawler or notice on the bottom of the screen or web page noting that the coverage of the Olympics and of China itself is subject to censorship by the PRC government. I think their attempts to censure, with the approval of the IOC will backfire on them as it makes them look like bullies and very unsure of themselves or the truth.