China is ranked at 173 in the
most recent World
Press Freedom Index due in part to its track record for imprisoning
journalists and censoring the Internet. And the situation shows no sign of
improving.Foreign media were literally pushed away from the story."And
it's gotten much worse in recent years," says Charles Hutzler, the Wall
Street Journal's China Bureau Chief who has over 20 years of experience covering
China."Particularly in the countryside and in small towns, if you happen
to be covering a story that the local officials just do not want to get out,
they will do more than push people around. They will grab cameras and
confiscate them, and in some cases smash them."
Visa
threat
Foreign correspondents in China face bureaucratic harassment as
well, with the increasing threat of having a visa not renewed or
even revoked."This year of course was unprecedented, the pressure on the
New York Times and Bloomberg, both of which had written about the private
financial affairs of relatives of senior leaders," says Peter Ford,
President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China and Beijing Bureau Chief
for the Christian Science Monitor."Entire bureaus of those
organizations were implicitly threatened, because they had to wait for their
visas until the very, very last minute."Ford adds: "In the absence
of any official explanation of why they had to wait this long, it will
certainly feed suspicion that it's retribution for the content of their
coverage."
But the risks are far greater for
Chinese nationals who can be continually harassed or jailed for contributing to
a sensitive report."Foreign correspondents are at times vulnerable, but
really, the people we most need to protect are our sources, and then our
Chinese colleagues, because unlike a foreign correspondent they can't leave,"
Hutzler says.The government says it wants journalists to cover news in an
objective and fair-minded way. But at the same time, does what it can to shut
down or discredit stories that upset the political balance.
Losing
its grip
Despite its attempts to pressure
reporters and their sources and to craft a state-approved version of events,
Beijing appears to be losing its grip on the story."As China becomes more
open and more integrated in the economy, there's more information available.
(With) listed companies in New York and Hong Kong, company records are
available. Official affiliations to these companies are available. So the new
phenomenon now is getting at the data and to mine the information," says
Ying Chan, journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong and co-director
of the China Media Project.
But if China wants an open
economy, it must be open to transparency. And more transparency means more data
for journalists to dig into.Likewise, more access to social media platforms
like Sina Weibo or Tencent's WeChat has led to more citizen journalists
breaking the story.
"The proliferation and
availability of smartphones means that migrant workers in factories in South
China are also communicating through social media, whether it's through WeChat
or Weibo," says Hutzler.
Enterprising
reporters
"The government is trying
very hard to get on top of these technologies, but I think the trend is there.
They're losing control of the narrative."Even from inside China's media
machine, enterprising local reporters are working independently of the official
party line. "They are doing good work in commercial-run media. But also
some are doing good work in the state media and that's interesting," Chan
tells me."We cannot assume that if it's a party paper, you must be toeing
the party line. This is the growing diversity of coverage in local Chinese
media."And if they are censored in print, they can always push the story
online. Ying Chan fires up WeChat on her smartphone, and shows me an array of
independent Chinese media channels inside the popular messaging app.Beijing may
be playing rough with reporters, but reporters are playing smart. There's still
room to maneuver around China's big black spot on journalism.
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