Being chased for a report on climate change by cars full of police officers, who send drones after you as soon as you leave the car. Sources who call after an interview to say they will sue you if you broadcast the interview. Or after a long journey through China, you hear upon arrival that the interview appointment has been canceled due to pressure from the local authorities.
It's the kind of situation foreign journalists in China regularly faced last year, according to the latest survey from the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, published Monday. The authors of the annual report paint a bleak picture of working conditions for foreign correspondents in the country. A total of 101 of them took part in the FCCC's annual survey, about a quarter of the total of 400 foreign journalists working in the country according to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which does not recognize the professional interest group.
Of the correspondents who participated in the research, 81 percent say they will have experienced “interference, intimidation, or violence” in 2023. More than half of respondents (54 percent) were prevented from doing their work or stopped by the police or other officials.
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At the same time, it gives a more positive picture than in previous years, when going out to report was almost impossible due to China's strict corona measures. According to the report, correspondents are happy with this improvement, but they are also increasingly confronted with the difficult media climate in the country, which had already deteriorated before the pandemic.
Americans in particular are banned
Access to the country remains a tricky issue. For the majority of foreign correspondents, including most European media, visa applications in 2023 were smoother than in previous years. But one US media organization was approved for a visa for a new correspondent, replacing a journalist who had left the country. All other US applications were rejected.
Since 2020, when China expelled 20 mostly American journalists after the Trump administration reduced the number of visas for Chinese journalists, press visas have become part of the geopolitical tensions between China and the United States. It's a big problem for American newsrooms in China, which are now understaffed. Because the issue is the subject of diplomatic negotiations, American journalists wanted it NRC did not comment on this in the media.
The Chinese state's changing attitude towards foreign media goes back further than the last few years, says Linette Lim, a researcher on China's media climate at University College Dublin. Since taking office in 2013, President Xi Jinping has viewed foreign influence as a security issue. In a well-known 2016 speech by Xi, he told a group of party cadres that China no longer had to fear invasions and hunger imposed by the outside world, but that it was still unfairly criticized. China had to make its “own voice” louder. Lim: “You can see that he finds this very important. That criticism points to criticism from the West, which always tells China what to do.”
Prominent international media, such as the BBC and The New York Times, have become a symbol for that foreign criticism, and are regularly accused of creating 'fake news'. In her research among foreign correspondents, Lim discovered that English-language media experience the most problems, but that there also seems to be a broader stigma of trouble-seekers attached to foreign media. “There is [voor Chinese mensen] no advantage to talking to foreign media. While there might be a hassle.”
Fewer “deeper stories”
Ian Johnson, an analyst at the Council for Foreign Relations think tank in New York, also saw the shift. His work as a China correspondent for American media such as The New York Times came to an abrupt end in 2020, when his visa was also canceled. Johnson, who has worked in China since the 1990s, thinks the Chinese government never liked critical foreign reporting, but that “for decades it saw foreign journalism as part of the game you had to play with the world.”
The Chinese government now appears to no longer “accept that situation as necessary.” Foreign journalists in the country still have more space to do their work than their Chinese counterparts, who faced the second-worst media environment in the world, just above North Korea, according to the World Press Freedom Index last year. But the Chinese government is also becoming more assertive when it comes to critical voices in the foreign press. For example, the Chinese embassy in The Hague twice published a statement this year criticizing one or more Dutch media organizations for their “negative” and “biased” reporting on Taiwan and Hong Kong.
According to Johnson, restrictions on press freedom lead to fewer “deeper stories” about what it is like to live in China or about social trends. The New York Times, which had twelve foreign reporters in China ten years ago and now two, now has much less time for that. “That is a real problem, also for bilateral relations. To understand who you are dealing with, you have to know what is going on in China.”
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