As per the latest Media Freedoms report published by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC), overseas press agents in China are facing “unprecedented hurdles” due to the government there blocking and discrediting independent reporting.
On-ground coverage of China is becoming difficult with journalists increasingly forced to leave the country, the report adds. The FCCC notes that it is troubled by the growing pace at which freedom of media in the country is declining ahead of the Olympic Games.
China has used the pretext of the coronavirus outbreak to delay approvals of new journalist visas, decline interview requests and cancel reporting trips, the report further states.
The FCCC conducted an annual survey of foreign journalists in which 99% of respondents indicated that the reporting conditions in China were below international standards. In addition, 46% of respondents said that their bureaus were understaffed, as they were unable to bring in the required number of journalists. Further, 52% of them said that they were told to leave a place or denied access for health and safety reasons even when they presented no risk, as per China’s own regulations. 62% of respondents also said that they were obstructed, at least once, by police or other officials.
In addition to this, 88% of journalists who travelled to Xinjiang, an autonomous territory in northwest China that is home to several ethnic minority groups, mentioned that they were followed.
More than a quarter of the respondents also said that their sources were harassed, detained, or called in for questioning by police, multiple times. The report also revealed that Chinese authorities sanctioned lawsuits against foreign journalists, filed by their sources, long after they explicitly agreed to be interviewed.
Further, attacks against foreign journalists in the form of State-backed online trolling campaigns has led residents to assume that foreign media officials are their enemies, resulting in violence against and harassment of journalists on the field. The harassment extends to their families and has been so severe in some instances as to lead to correspondents simply leaving mainland China, the report adds.
Recommended
Chinese government has been tightening its control over media for some time now. In October 2021, China’s national planning agency released a draft regulation aimed at restricting news media. Released as part of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to expand Communist Party control in the country, the new regulations were an update to the country’s existing restrictions on private investment in media. They also reiterated pre-existing rules prohibiting private outlets from reporting and broadcasting news and added a new ban on hosting news-related forums or award ceremonies.
In its latest report, the FCCC called on China to “boost confidence in its story not by flooding the world with highly orchestrated state propaganda, but by also letting others tell that story.”