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China Human Rights and Rule of Law Update
Mixed Progress for Olympic Foreign Reporting Regulations One Year Later
A year after China's Regulations on Reporting Activities in China by Foreign Journalists During the Beijing Olympic Games and the Preparatory Period went into effect, a Beijing-based association of foreign journalists noted "improved overall reporting conditions for foreign journalists" but also "hot spots where journalists have experienced repeated violations" of the regulations, according to a January 1 Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) press release. The temporary regulations, effective from January 1, 2007 to October 17, 2008, give foreign journalists greater freedom to report in China, something the International Olympic Committee required China do in order to host the 2008 Olympics. Specifically, foreign journalists no longer need separate government permission to interview individuals and organizations that consent to be interviewed. Furthermore, the regulations apply to a foreign journalist's coverage of all kinds of topics, not just those related to the Olympics.
The FCCC press release notes that while foreign journalists reported "easier travel and better access to officials," they also reported to the FCCC 180 incidents of "reporting interference" in 2007. Of particular concern were reports of: - "Plainclothes thugs" intimidating or physically assaulting foreign journalists. Cited as an example was an incident in September in which more than a dozen "thugs" beat a Reuters reporter trying to investigate allegations that an "illicit detention center" in Beijing was holding petitioners.
- Local authorities following journalists and holding them in custody, including in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and the Tibet Autonomous Region, and "preventing many Chinese citizens who agree to be interviewed from talking to foreign journalists." One example occurred in August, when a French journalist reported being frequently followed in Kashgar and surrounding counties while investigating allegations that teenage Uighur girls sent to work in factories in eastern China had been abused. The journalist reported that a source and a family he had met were subsequently questioned. In a more recent incident, reported by Reporters Without Borders on January 11, Beijing police prevented foreign journalists from interviewing Zeng Jinyan, a prominent blogger and the wife of detained activist Hu Jia.
- Central government attempts to compel media organizations to drop certain interviews or news stories. The FCCC said that several media outlets had reported being warned to cancel interviews with Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian and the Dalai Lama, or face "the consequences."
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), the government agency in charge of foreign journalists in China, has cited the difficulty of implementing a new regulation and argued that it is unrealistic to expect implementation to proceed without any problems. "The regulations' full implementation needs close coordination among different government bodies and it takes time for local governments and organizations to fully understand the terms of the regulations," said Liu Jianchao, Director-General of the Information Department of MOFA in an August 3 China Daily article. Liu noted progress had been made, however, saying that foreign media were now making fewer complaints. He touted the regulations as creating a "better environment for foreign journalists to cover their stories in China in a more comprehensive, objective and balanced way...."
Foreign reporters have reported some progress as a result of the regulations, as noted above, and in separate reports released in August by the FCCC, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and Human Rights Watch (HRW). For example, the HRW report found that for some reporters the new regulations had "significantly widened access to sources and topics previously taboo, such as access to certain prominent political dissidents and to villages with public health emergencies." The FCCC's January press release said it believed "the new regulations have been a positive step that has brought China closer to meeting international standards."
Anecdotal evidence over the last year, however, suggests several ongoing obstacles to full implementation of the regulations and the spirit behind them. As MOFA has acknowledged, ensuring local officials' compliance with the national regulation has proven difficult. Foreign reporters have encountered local officials who deny knowledge of the regulations or erroneously insist that the regulations apply only to coverage of the Olympics, according to the August FCCC report and HRW report. MOFA has reportedly been helpful in resolving some of these disputes, according to the CPJ report. And while foreign reporters themselves have gained greater freedom to report, authorities have sought to intimidate their Chinese interviewees and co-workers, neither of whom is explicitly protected by the regulations. Authorities have questioned Chinese co-workers, kept them under surveillance, and intimidated members of their family, according to the August FCCC report and HRW report. HRW reported that officials warned a source he would have to "bear the consequences" if he spoke to foreign journalists, and the FCCC reported that interviewees had been chided for "disgracing their own country." In addition, MOFA, which controls a foreign journalist's entry into and ability to remain in China, has called journalists into the foreign ministry to reprimand them for their stories. HRW noted that these reprimands "appear to have become a fallback position for the Chinese government to intimidate foreign correspondents whose coverage displeases them" since the regulations had somewhat weakened "the government's capacity to proactively and overtly prevent such reporting." Finally, Chinese propaganda officials have stepped up censorship of the domestic media's reporting on certain topics out of concern that foreign journalists were picking up story ideas from their domestic counterparts.
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China's (CECC) 2007 Annual Report called on China to live up to its commitment to grant foreign journalists complete freedom to report in China before and during the 2008 Olympics Games, to remove the October 2008 expiration of this commitment, and to grant similar protections to domestic journalists, for which this commitment does not apply. Domestic journalists remain subject to a wide range of government and Party regulations, policies, and pressures that encourage self-censorship and hinder their ability to report freely. For more information on China's restrictions on its own journalists, see Section II - Freedom of Expression, in the CECC's 2007 Annual Report.
| Source: -See Summary (2008-01-25 / English / Free) |
Posted on: 2008-05-05 |
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| Link directly to this item with: http://www.cecc.gov/pages/virtualAcad/index.phpd?showsingle=101924 |
Central Propaganda Department Restricts Reporting on Air Quality, Food Safety
The Central Propaganda Department (CPD) of the Chinese Communist Party recently issued a notice to Chinese news editors restricting domestic coverage of topics relating to China's hosting of the 2008 Olympics, including air quality and food safety, according to a November 13 South China Morning Post (SCMP) report (subscription required). The report said that the CPD, responsible for ensuring that China's media follow the Communist Party's lead, delivered the notice during the week of November 5 and that the notice "ordered journalists to steer clear of Olympics-related story ideas that could show the country in a bad light." A source who read the notice told the SCMP that it identified air quality, food safety, the Olympic torch relay, and the Paralympics as topics that had recently generated "unfavorable publicity" in the foreign media. The source said the notice "requires state media to put a spin on those topics to 'offset the bad publicity' created by those previous reports." The SCMP added that Chinese media regulators were becoming more aware of the influence domestic stories have on foreign media coverage of China, noting that "most foreign media pick up story ideas from the domestic press." CPD directives, which are frequently issued in response to politically sensitive events, may apply to any Chinese journalist.
Such notices violate international standards for freedom of expression. Article 19 of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which China signed and has committed to ratify, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), guarantees the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas. The ICCPR and UDHR permit states to restrict this freedom under a limited number of circumstances, but furthering a political agenda is not one of the permitted exceptions. In addition to the ICCPR and UDHR protections, Article 35 of China's Constitution provides that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of the press.
The notice follows other instances this year where the CPD and local propaganda officials have exercised their power to restrict or manipulate domestic reporting for political reasons: - In August, the CPD issued an almost complete ban on reporting about a bridge collapse that killed 64 people amid suspicions of corruption and shoddy construction, according to an August 17 Associated Press report (reprinted in the International Herald Tribune).
- In July, local propaganda officials in Beijing ordered a Beijing newspaper to discontinue its political reporting and warned other local papers not to issue "negative" news about food safety, according to a July 31 SCMP report (subscription required). The actions came amid rising international concern over the safety of China's food exports and followed the discovery that a Beijing television reporter had falsified a news report claiming that food vendors were filling steamed buns with pieces of cardboard.
- In January, the CPD ordered media executives not to focus on problems in China's legal system or the excesses of corrupt officials and to emphasize stories "that preserve social stability and avoid triggering social conflict" in the run-up to the annual National People's Congress session held in March and the 17th Party Congress held in October, according to a February 27 Washington Post report.
The notice also calls into question China's commitment, set forth in the Beijing Olympic Action Plan issued by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games in 2002, to "be open in every aspect to the rest of the country and the whole world" in its preparations for the Olympics. The plan also says that China will bring "into full play the role of public supervision" and that "the preparation for Olympic Games will be transparent." By restricting local media coverage of air quality and food safety, China threatens to hinder public monitoring of the air quality and food safety commitments it made for the Olympics, even as concern about China's ability to fulfill such commitments remains. In its bid, China promised that "air quality during the period of the Games in 2008 will be of a high quality, and meet Chinese and WHO [World Health Organization] standards." A 2007 report by the United Nations Environment Programme noted, however, that levels of small particulate matter "remain well above" current WHO air quality guidelines and that "despite the relatively positive trends of recent years, air quality remains a legitimate concern for Olympic organizers, competitors and observers, as well as for the citizens of Beijing." Controversies this year involving such food products as fish and eggs have called into question China's system for monitoring food production, putting greater spotlight on China's pledge to ensure the safety of food for Olympic participants, as reported in a July 11 Xinhua article (reprinted on the Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games).
The recent restrictions on domestic reporters come in a year when hosting the 2008 Olympics has prompted China to issue regulations that, on paper, relax restrictions on foreign journalists reporting in China. For more information about the CPD and restrictions on the reporting activities of Chinese journalists, see Section II--Freedom of Expression in the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's 2007 Annual Report.
| Source: -See Summary (2007-12-14 / English / Free) |
Posted on: 2008-05-05 |
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| Link directly to this item with: http://www.cecc.gov/pages/virtualAcad/index.phpd?showsingle=101098 |
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