The Foreign Correspondent's Club of China (FCCC)
has posted
a
statement on its Web site about Chinese security
officials--uniformed and otherwise--harassing foreign journalists in and around
Tiananmen Square. The group's
incident list
includes five cases of obstruction reported in the past week. As usual in
situations the government finds sensitive, police are not following regulations
adopted in January 2007 that were intended to ease restrictions on
international reporters.
Many journalists are in Beijing this week to report on the June 4
anniversary of the antigovernment uprising. A number of former China correspondents who were in Beijing in 1989 are
remembering their own work from the time. On The New York Times photography blog, Lens,
Jeff Widener remembers the day he took one of the iconic "tank man" photographs
for The Associated Press on June 5, 1989:
I was sick as a dog with the flu and suffering from a
severe concussion. A stray rock had struck my face while photographing a
burning armored car during the Tiananmen uprising. The Nikon F3 Titanium camera
had had absorbed the shock and thus saved my life.
While foreign journalists rarely encounter assignments that dangerous
in China
today, the pattern of official interference they face hasn't improved as much
as the government's propaganda department (rebranded, in the English
translation only, as a "publicity" department in 1998) would like everyone to
think. Donna Liu's experience trying to dodge security officials as a CNN
producer on June 3, 1989, would sound familiar to some of her colleagues in China today:
"When I walked through the front door [of the Beijing
Hotel], I was grabbed by Chinese security," Liu recalls in an interview
with CNN. "They threw me against the wall, took my bag, and took the
tapes." (Liu is married to CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Bob Dietz.)
Compare this
incident from Sichuan in May 2008 in the aftermath of the earthquake, when "police
confiscated press cards from a TV team in Juyuan and tried to forcibly seize
video the team took of the Sichuan earthquake disaster area," according to the
FCCC. Detention for questioning, albeit brief, was also a common occurrence for
foreign
journalists covering the Olympics last year. Unrest in Tibet led to the expulsion of
international reporters from the region in March
2008, and again a year later in 2009.
The Chinese government's censorship of Tiananmen
media coverage--and its equivalent online--is
attracting attention because of the extreme political sensitivity of Thursday's
landmark anniversary. The repressive tactics in evidence this week are particularly
aggressive, but as foreign journalists in China today can testify, by no
means unusual.
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